←Recommendations of GREAT WHITE

A great complicated play about real shit. No pulled punched. No easy answers. Not happy endings. Recommend.

I read this play a couple of years ago, and continue to think about it. Especially when I see anything about sharks. Of course, it's not really about sharks so much as it's about the way one broken family functions, and its ideas have a true power to stick with you and linger long afterwards. But then ... sharks. This is a great play.

Premiere Stages, the professional Equity theatre company in residence at Kean University, is pleased to recognize Great White by Deborah Yarchun as a Semi-Finalist for the 2024 Premiere Play Festival. Great White rose through a competitive selection process conducted by Premiere staff and a panel of outside theatre professionals to become one of 48 Semi-Finalists out of 760 submissions. The panel was particularly impressed how Great White is a gripping, visceral play about mental health, difficult family relationships, and climate change that earns its intense moments. Our congratulations and thanks to Deborah.

We are pleased to support this play! It was a Finalist for the 2023 New Works Festival at Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas, Texas.

Great White is a play you will not be able to walk away from. Deborah Yarchun explores the struggle with mental health and family in a sensitive and compelling way. The use of distress calls throughout the play is a powerful statement that provides insight into the mental wellbeing of all of the characters and allows the audience to move through the same emotions the characters are.

A powerful story of the love for family, the struggles one copes with and the danger that encroaches as the trauma builds. Well done.

This is such a deeply theatrical play and I'm aching to see it performed. The characters are complex and challenging. It can be hard to empathize with people in circumstances we don't fully understand, so it is especially remarkable that Yarchun has depicted a family struggling with mental illness in a way that lets us in and truly does bring us to feel for each character, even and especially when their actions (or inactions) are upsetting.

An exquisite and theatrical exploration of mental illness and complex family relationships. The broader use of climate change, Brooke's obsession with Mary Lee, and Gail's post-it note coping strategy provide beautiful, nuanced, and subtle extended metaphors that bolster the human core of the play. There is also something really poignant about reading it right now--it begs to be staged and creatively realized on its feet, and I can't wait to see it live some day. There's so much here for a whole production team--from actors to directors to designers to movement folks--to sink its teeth into.

Hypnotic, powerful, and unsettling. Scientific and emotional truths ring out long after the play is over. I still find myself thinking about animal distress calls.

Beautifully rendered characters, relationships portrayed with compassion and honesty. The language is evocative yet useful, and the place serves the play well as a real place and a metaphor that works to heighten our experience -- and there is a great intensity to the play that keeps us on the edge of our seats!