←Recommendations of LAURA AND THE SEA

What a beautiful, strange, timely, poetic piece! I love Kate Tarker's wit and really admire how she's crafted something here that has such a profound and resonant inner ache while painting with big, fun, primary colors. Tarker gifts her ensemble with generous stage directions that allow for robust play and true freedom of interpretation, and cares for her audience, too, by toggling between the alienating and the narratively familiar, thereby allowing us, through her words, to see this very strange world we're all inhabiting afresh...

How sad is it really that we seem to know so little about those we spend the most time with, our coworkers. An eye opening piece to forming deep connections with those we come across, not just looking for their positive happy traits. Well done.

Both slyly funny and quietly devastating, LAURA AND THE SEA balances its light and darkness to electrifying effect. The piece’s playing space is both mundane office and boat-scape, a place where “realities bend and overlap,” where emails are embodied by people and an in memoriam blog projects larger than life onto the boat’s sail. It's a wildly creative conceit that brings its performers' physicality to the forefront.

Unlike any other play I've read, in the best of ways. A drama/comedy about the people we work with--the people we spend so much time with, yet don't know at all. Structurally innovative and ingenious, this play sticks with me long after I first read it.

Genius

LAURA AND THE SEA is the funniest sad play I have ever read. Kate has created such a quirky yet relatable world in this script that is ripe with theatrical possibility. Worlds and realities blend and overlap. The characters are charming and flawed and lovable. We developed this play in our 2016 SLAC Lab and also presented a reading of it in our New Play Sounding Series. The discussion that followed the reading was one of our best; the audience was completely taken with the story, and charmed and challenged by the world of the play.

Saw this when it was read at the Vineyard; crazy beautiful and heartbreaking and funny, absolutely worth the read