Love how unique and experimental this play gets. The lack of stage directions is a brilliant choice. It lets us focus on the poetic dialogue and leaves the possibilities endless for directorial choices.

Sarah's plays all take place in a reality that is a lot like ours, but slightly more demented and infinitely more tender. A play that also functions as a piece of film crit about idol worship, the transference that happens when we watch movies, and the female gaze (or at least Jake Gyllenhaal's mom's gaze.)

River Phoenix Fugue represents the best kind of meta-theatre, the kind which truly adds to the mythos, conversation, and intrigue of its source material. Leiber's characters are mirrors, each reflecting their favorite movie's events—beat-for-beat—back at the audience in a flurry of description and reaction that keeps the mind's eye chugging along. With this play, Leiber cements herself as a writer not only interested in pop culture and its stars, but deeply, encyclopedically reverential of it.