Sometimes moving away is not enough to add distance to the end of a relationship. In "Last Exit," Philip Middleton Williams gives us two characters whose breakup is in the past but their baggage is still very much in the present (and omnipresent, for that matter). I loved the way that in a few short pages, Williams gives us years — decades? — of the characters' lives, Each reminiscence, each quip leaves the audience and characters wondering, "Where will they go from here?" — right up to the final line. This is a brilliant relationship drama. Well done!

There’s so much history between these characters in white space on the page, one could go snowblind in the emotion of it all. A break up play is one thing, a post-breakup goodbye play is a different hat trick. Feelings have been around longer: anger faded but still with a bitter aftertaste, love lingering like an old paint job. The characters use reminiscences to establish and infiltrate boundaries, parrying and enticing, saying things they’ve left unspoken too long. Yet, Williams gives them a profound immediacy and a hope that resonates like keys to a new life.

The end of a long-term relationship is a kind of death, filled with the grief, nostalgia, recriminations, and subjective memories of good times and bad. In this highly emotional, at times brutally honest, short play, Williams deftly employs his customary humanism and realism as he lays bare a couple’s long-unspoken feelings of love and, sometimes, hate. Intriguingly, this story of moving on to the next chapter of one’s life takes an open-ended twist in its final moments.