A wild ride through theatrical terrain that sears the senses and impacts the audience at a visceral place, which also manages to be hilariously funny and heartbreakingly real in the five core scenes of a young woman's visit to the deathbed of her friend. Her moment of acknowledgment and comfort comes hard in the face of denial, moralizing, insane positive thinking, desperate chit chat, and the existential fears we all harbor about the end moments of life - the great mystery. "CARNIVAL ROUND THE CENTRAL FIGURE is steeped in the absurd - the man's face is caked with white makeup, and a menacing nurse sits nearby, holding a needle about three feet long. Yet like much in this clever and confounding meditation on dying, what is unusual can also be affecting. CARNIVAL is a funny and beguiling 100 minutes, aimed at those eager for an experimental look into its themes. In the end the play merely reminds us of the obvious: we're all destined to die. Yet it's a message that bears repeating. Such great truths are too often ignored, and are best told with a nervous laugh." -New York Times "Comedies don't come much darker than Diana Amsterdam's CARNIVAL ROUND THE CENTRAL FIGURE, a hard-core but justified lampooning of the strange etiquette we adhere to when watching loved ones pass away. Amsterdam's relentless script makes a glib burlesque out of the oblique religious platitudes, idle chitchat, and straight-up dishonesty we typically inflict upon the dying." -Backstage "CARNIVAL ROUND THE CENTRAL FIGURE will certainly strike a powerful chord ..." -New York Post