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Recommendations

Recommendations

  • Tabitha Ray:
    26 Feb. 2024
    My grandfather's bluegrass songbook is filled with down-tempo ballads about lonely graves and long-lost loves. Bluegrass, like Gunderson's Heath, refashions the small, the personal, into matters of great weight; operatic emotions coursing through a down-home tune. What a gift to give your grandfather– Lear's language to meet the feeling of the moment! I lost my grandmother to an aggressive form of dementia. Bluegrass hasn't made my grandfather feel "better", but, to borrow from the canon, it must "give a very echo to the seat where love is throned". Gunderson, Shakespeare, and bluegrass know that feeling better isn't always the point.
  • Jillian Blevins:
    1 Dec. 2022
    Banjo + Shakespeare = perfection. I was lucky enough to see this piece performed at MRT in 2018. Gunderson’s metatheatrical autobiography invites us into her very real struggle to reconcile her conflicting feelings about her grandfather, with whom she shared a deep connection but differed from in many important ways (his holy text is the Bible; hers is Shakespeare). The storm of Lear’s madness is a powerful metaphor for her grandfather’s Alzheimer’s, and Gunderson’s transformation into first Cordelia and then The Fool allows her to try to enter his world and get answers about their relationship.
  • Samantha Marchant:
    1 Dec. 2022
    Resonated on many levels, this script reaches for connection.
  • Angels Theatre Company:
    6 Feb. 2022
    There is something stark and simple about Lauren Gunderson’s The Heath. It is theatre and storytelling in its most raw and honest format. It is messy, rough, strange, unfinished, and “meta” (really meta). However, to call this play meta-theatrical is at once accurate and overly simple. For, in telling this story, Lauren exposes her vulnerability and her fear as a playwright and as a grand-daughter. It is not a typical hackneyed or gimmicky meta-theatrical statement on the postmodern situation of the theatre as a whole, but a way of story-telling that is deeply personal, fundamentally revealing, and altogether beautiful.
  • Cheryl Bear:
    21 Apr. 2021
    A moving musical journey along the road to walking through Alzheimers with a loved one. Beautifully done.
  • Emily McClain:
    8 Jan. 2021
    As always, Gunderson's blending of science, literature, and interpersonal connections creates a beautiful mosaic of the human experience. This play is an intense emotional journey and anyone who has a complicated relationship with a loved one but still held that loved one's hand as they walked a lonely road of aging and dementia can relate to Lauren's experience. People are complex creatures, y'all.