A critic is seated smack in the middle of a series of events he is meant to review, and people mistake each other for things they are not. A wild, vaudevillian comedy that investigates the critical impulse, from its most elegant to its most petty, Critical Mass features actors who run into the audience and criticize the show as if they were members of it, then return to their roles as performers. Actors regard one another’s body type, weight gain, genital size, sexual agility; a cocktail party leads to tears, the theater critic weeps over his memory of a poignant performance of Beckett’s Godot; booing at a sports arena is parsed as a form of criticism, the Narrator and the Critic find a way to come together and then fall inevitably apart, and criticism is regarded from every angle as a systemic, irreversible and terminal part of the human condition.