Oh wow. This play about a teenage girl struggling after her best friend dies in a school shooting is so, so good. There's plenty of sadness, but there's also humor as well. I love the way the group text is represented on stage, and Emily Hageman absolutely nails teenage voices. This is a wonderful study on grief and grappling with the discovery that sometimes in this world wrong wins.

A deeply-felt work about the epidemic of school violence, “Joan’s Arc” manages to be beautifully personal and introspective, while also frank and uncompromising in its message. Hageman is incredibly skilled at crafting high school-aged characters that feel real and I was particularly impressed with how essential each one was to the themes and the story and the play’s central questions. A necessarily raw but hopeful piece on grief, memory, and the loss of innocence; one of the best I’ve read about the topic.

Joan's Arc is a phenomenally laid out show that finds the perfect line between humor and tragedy. It tackles a subject incredibly hard and does it justice, but still manages to find a moment to make the reader laugh without being insensitive and also finds the beats that have you feeling all types of emotions. Beautifully made.