←Recommendations of The Last Buckley

Nathan Cann never disappoints. He's crafted a really gripping (and bitingly funny) play about a modern-day political dynasty. The Last Buckley is a gripping family drama that unfolds beautifully until the last of a series of revelations leaves the audience spent! The central Character, Candice Buckley, is a tour-de-force role that smacks of August Osage County, The Royal Family, Other Desert Cities, and so many where powerful women drive the narrative.

A powerful look at a political family and the driving force behind it as it may be undone. Well done.

A briskly-paced, intelligently written piece that centers around a dynamic and engaging family. It's beautifully structured, beginning with a sense of tension and comedy that play off one another well and serve as a potent preamble to unsettling and surprising, yet entirely plausible revelations. Cann explores a distinctly American brand of political ambition and desire by illuminating the individual story of this very well-rendered family. I'd love to see this in production!

This play was developed at The National New Play Network MFA Playwrights Workshop. This program, conducted annually in conjunction with The Kennedy Center and the National Center for New Plays, provides a graduate–level student playwright with an NNPN-affiliated director and dramaturg, a professional cast for a week of script development, and an introduction to the Network, its Membership, and programs.

It is the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's pleasure to recommend Nathan Cann and their play "The Last Buckley" as a finalist for our 2015 National Playwrights Conference. The play rose through a competitive, anonymous, multileveled selection process that took nearly nine months to execute. As one of 59 finalists out of more than 1,300 submissions, it is the value of the page that has allowed this work to prosper in such a competitive selection process. Our readers especially responded to the play’s high familial dramatic stakes and the ever-shifting tensions and micro-power plays among the characters.

Whip-smart. Hilarious. Touching. Mr. Cann has written a terrific play about the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive.

Oh the lengths to which we will go to get our way! Cann gives us a glimpse into the undoing of a woman who has long been at the center of a political dynasty, and shows us how easily fiction becomes fact when you imbue it with a sense of being "for the good of the people." This is a very human story of those in power and their empowerment - very timely.