←Recommendations of Ballast

A beautiful piece about gender and transition with the connection to spirituality and our relationships. Well done.

A multi-layered exploration of transition - between sleep and waking, male and female, groundedness and flight. Poetic, peripatetic but still practical. Inclusive in scope and concisely packaged. A uniquely topical read.

Ballast is a beautiful play about marriage, love and self-preservation. All the characters are appealing and their stories converge around the theme of becoming one's true self. This play is exquisitely emotionally honest and thoughtfully composed. The complexity of the ideas presented is mirrored by the poetry of its language. And the subject matter is urgently important. It is a play about characters in transition but it manages not to be an issue play and remains at all times a powerful, character-driven story.

It is the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's pleasure to recommend Georgette Kelly and their play Ballast as a finalist for our 2016 National Playwrights Conference. The play rose through a competitive, anonymous, multileveled selection process that took nearly nine months to execute. As one of 54 finalists out of more than 1,450 submissions, the strength of its writing has allowed this work to prosper in such a competitive selection process. Our readers especially appreciated the use of dreamscapes as innovative storytelling.

Ballast is beautifully written, featuring deep, three-dimensional characters, balanced storytelling and a well paced script that utilizes both prose and poetry, resulting in a script that flows as effortlessly as a symphony or ballet. Heartbreaking and relatable, Kelly's play is a unique foundation for a director and designers to create a wonderfully theatric full night of theatre.

I really enjoyed the spiritual journey of these characters and the flow of this play between the two sets of relationships facing a crisis. There's a lot of nuance in the relationships, as each pair is struggling to understand the huge shifts happening with their partner. Plays, first and foremost, should lift us into poetry and this play does a fantastic job conveying metaphors while also writing with realistic specificity the difficult emotional inner life. I have faith that someone soon will recognize this playwright's skill and produce this one.