Oedipus/Otto: plays multiple roles including Oedipus, King of Thebes. When told as a young man that he was destined to kill his father and marry his mother, he left his home and came to Thebes. There he solved the riddle of the sphinx and married Queen Jocasta without realizing she was his real mother. Now Thebes has been attacked by plague. Oedipus is a strong, proud leader, determined to rescue his city from the plague by finding out who killed its former king. Short of temper. Also plays Otto, in a wheelchair, possibly a retired teacher. Mild mannered and curious, he is plagued by dreams in which he seems to have murdered someone. He becomes fascinated by newspaper reports of a crime on the highway, as if somehow this crime is related to him or his dreams. He has a close loving relationship with his daughter Annalee.

Antigone/Annalee: plays multiple roles including Antigone, daughter of Oedipus. Strong, determined, passionate about how she lives her life. Uncompromising, loving. Also plays Annalee, daughter of Otto. Married to a violent man who has killed their babysitter. Terrified it will affect her baby son's future because of what he has seen. Blunt, outspoken, determined, loves her father.

Jocasta/Jocelyn: Jocasta is the Queen of Thebes. Attractive, sensual, high status, proud, a strong match for her husband Oedipus. He is in fact her son. Perhaps she has always known or suspected this and does not want the truth to come out. Mild Northern Irish accent. Jocelyn is the wife of Otto. A Southwestern housewife. Otto is an anxious man, but she is the calm one, unruffled, wants a peaceful life, avoids conflict. A gently warm personality.

Uncle Del/Traveler/Tiresias/Maniac Of The Outskirts: with a strong comic sense, irony, sense of detachment from society's madness. Plays multiple roles, including Uncle Del, based on the Oracle at Delphi. Reads signs, throws the bones, and sacrifices animals to read their intestines; Traveler. blind, lives in the hills and can see the future; Tiresias, a blind seer called to Oedipus to reveal what he knows about why the city is ridden with plague; and Maniac of the Outskirts, an anonymous madman who lives on the outskirts of society and gets blamed for everything. Bitter, pissed off, sarcastic, comic. Think Ratso Ritzo in "Midnight Cowboy."

Laius/Larry/Langos: powerful presence, good-looking, sexy, threatening, simmering, high status. Plays multiple roles including Laius, a king who ruled Thebes years before the Oedipus story. When his wife Queen Jocasta gave birth to their son, Oedipus, the child was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Laius took the child to the hills to be left to die. Years later he was killed at a crossroads in an altercation with Oedipus; Larry, a young, modern version of Laius, consulting a healer because his wife cannot conceive; and Langos, a gangster casino boss who denies at first that he ever had a son but then admits that he did abandon the child in the hills.

Randolph: an American detective who is very keen on the forensic aspect of the work. He is so obsessive about what one can glean about a crime from the evidence that he gets carried away and begins to picture the crime and the people and fantasize about them. Must have a strong comic sense.

Harrington: from the American Southwest. A highway policeman, he is laid back and feels very cynical about forensic experts. He sees the crime in a very straightforward way and simply assumes it is Mexican gang warfare. Bemused by Randolph's fanciful ideas gleaned from the evidence. Must have a strong comic sense.

Linda Winer, Newsweek:
Mythic, mysterious and obscure... The 90-minute drama, another transfer from actor Stephen Rea's Field Day company in Northern Ireland, is one of the more sober and obscure collages among Shepard's 50-odd, deeply scary, weirdly primal, often amusing works. In many ways, this feels like a return to the playwright's experimental off Off-Broadway beginnings... Ancient myth mingles with Irish accents and desert-rat Americana in a play that is both compelling and pretty ponderous. Still, nobody but Shepard could have written it.

Matthew Murray, Talking Broadway:
If not for Shepard’s other tension-packing device, of intricately disrupting the timeline so that, at certain moments, you’re not sure who’s involved in the event you’re watching or when exactly it’s happening, there would be no notable deviations from the source at all. This doesn’t exactly kill the evening, but it also doesn’t help it — you’re going to take away very little, if anything, from A Particle of Dread that you wouldn’t from a solid version of Oedipus Rex...

For her part, director Nancy Meckler has kept the pacing sharp and the actors focused, though she’s not able to conjure surprise when Shepard doesn’t give her enough cues to do so. Nor has she made convincing use of Frank Conway’s portentous but head-scratching abattoir set or the live musicians who oversell the spooky factor through Martin’s banshee-noir compositions. Too often, the production seems to be trying to say too much, in too many different ways. The script suffers from the opposite problem - Shepard’s message would come through more distinctly and more powerfully if we could see how it’s evolved across the last few thousand years. Resetting the action in the America of today only takes him so far, and the play feels as though it wants to go further than he allows it.

Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter:
This oblique intellectual exercise is likely to prove off-putting to all but the most adventurous audiences, although Shepard completists will no doubt want to catch the latest offering from the playwright's ever-restless imagination... Audience members will find themselves baffled at times by the juxtaposition of characters and situations, which seem to have been tossed into a blender and randomly reassembled.... Filled with comic digressions, the piece is frustratingly oblique rather than illuminating... Shepard's willful self-indulgence smacks more of an overeager university drama student than a seasoned playwright.

Wilborn Hampton, Huffington Post:
A Particle of Dread can be baffling, even for those attuned to Shepard's singular brand of storytelling. It is steeped in blood and horror and passion, all of which is couched in conversational chatter and interspersed with mundane trivialities. The references to Sophocles' great tragedy do not always follow a neat pattern, so that the audience has the sense of trying to put together a literary jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces missing. But there are poetic passages that can chill and excite. A Particle of Dread is probably a better play than the staging mounted by Nancy Meckler... Much of the current staging runs on low energy, as though Meckler and her cast were performing a dry revival of an ancient Greek tragedy.

Joe McGovern, Entertainment Weekly:
Unfortunately, Shepard and director Nancy Meckler fail to sustain  dramatic tension, resulting in an 85-minute slog of a thriller so muddled that even its obliqueness feels predictable. The idea of Shepard, that taciturn chronicler of American woe, taking on an adaptation of Oedipus Rex bursts with promise. And a version of the Sophocles tragedy about a king who murders his father and marries his mother shows up here, though it's uninterestingly mashed together with another narrative, concerning a roadside massacre in the California desert.

David Finkle, Huffington Post:
In one mind, I think it's terribly pretentious. In the other mind, I think it's terribly pretentious, but I'm willing to go with it in large part because of how audacious its pretensions are... As the actors quick-change costumes to appear back then or right now - no matter which characters they're playing - Shepard gets his jollies not only having them muddle through the similar predicaments and but also having them continually comment on them, sometimes drolly and sometimes cantankerously. I can't report that what he has them say is always crystal clear, nor can I insist a fair amount of the colloquy isn't irritatingly hoity-toity. But as played by the cast members with unflagging conviction, they never let Shepard's fireworks fizzle.

David Gordon, Theater Mania:
With three stories being told at once, certain cast members doubling and tripling in roles, and dialects alternating between Irish and American Southern, a crucial disconnect between text and production arises. Any equation Shepard is trying to make between contemporary life and ancient Greek circumstances becomes so muddled in accents and plots that you almost lose interest out of frustration. The physical production of Meckler's staging doesn't help.

Ben Brantley, NY Times:
But Mr. Shepard seems to be having a pretty good time contemplating the nature of tragedy, the value (or lack thereof) of self-knowledge and the persistence of myth in our collective memory. Directed by Nancy Meckler, with a cast led by the excellent Stephen Rea and Brid Brennan, this Irish-born production is a restless riff on ancient themes that ultimately says more about its creator than its subject.

This makes it must-see viewing for students and hard-core fans of Mr. Shepard, whose singular imagination produced the American masterpieces Buried Child and True West. Others are likely to leave Particle bothered and bewildered. Though the production has been staged with theatrical flair and energy, it often comes across as an antic intellectual puzzle, suggesting a Rubik’s cube being twisted every which way by a highly precocious kid.

Robert Hofler, The Wrap:
Does it make sense? No, but dreams and madness rarely do, and Shepard's poetry and his wild juxtaposition of ancient royalty and modern-day desert manners involving illegal aliens, drugs, and dead babysitters is hallucinatory. Rea may be the first Oedipus to play the role in blood-spattered overalls, and he deftly handles Shepard's freewheeling segues from tragedy to slapstick and back.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, NY Post:
It’s hard to know what’s going on during Sam Shepard’s new play, but A Particle of Dread  always holds your interest. Having the great Irish star Stephen Rea is a bonus, but the style is pure Shepard, a writer who has laid bare the damaged soul of American families... This mix of brutality, humor and fatality stamps the whole evening, with Shepard drawing parallels between the violence of Greek tragedy and that of modern America. That’s just one possible interpretation, because the show is less than straightforward. And yet it works in its maddening way, especially since it offers plenty of Shepardian insights.