←Recommendations of The Afterparty (formerly known as the Claire Play)

Reina has written a dazzling, intelligent play that is both intimate and spectacular. The storytelling is brave, non-Aristotelian, and confidently shifts it's form several times over the course of 90 minutes. With it's deep insights into both our planet and the ones beyond it, I am blown away by it's mythic scope. Like if Thornton Wilder crashed your party and just got smashed, this play is funny, moving, and never fails to make me cry.

Once again, Reina Hardy takes the ephemeral, magical world and grounds it in characters and dialogue that feel as real as home. The Afterparty is a great example of what makes this playwright so exceptional - she lifts the mundane and brings the stars down to earth.

As always with Reina's work, you learn so much about the astronomical forces that guide our universe and the even more unfathomable forces that guide our hearts, this time with the help of Aristophanes, Johannes Kepler and Henrietta Leavitt at a party in the center of the cosmos. Reina's plays make me braver and happier to be alive.

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.

A play that I love dearly and can never read or see without shedding a tear. It's themes are much bigger than the small young people who tell its story.

I favorite of mine! A delightful love story told from the a fascinating point in a woman's life. This quirky and smart tale of a first love that will never die is one for anyone who has found that loss isn't forever and that a soul mate is one who never really leaves.