←Recommendations of Eight Minutes, Twenty Seconds

Wow. This complex two-hander packs a lot of emotion and questions about life, death, parenthood, regret, marriage, and more into a deceptively small package. And, for a play filled with so much pain and sorrow, there are also so many darkly hilarious lines sprinkled throughout. I can’t even imagine how powerful this would be to watch in person—having just read it, I’m sure I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time.

Sensational. The characters leap off the page and live vibrantly, fully, and viscerally. Precisely-constructed, beautifully shared, and powerful to the core.

This play is so skillfully crafted that not a moment was wasted. I latched onto the characters immediately and realized bits of them live in all of us. My heart ached for them as their incredibly moving and vibrant and supremely smart dialogue poured from the page. This play is so human, impossible to put down and I felt breathless as I read. I loved the intensity of its focus. These two, Right now. In this moment. Wonderful, beautiful play!

John Yearly’s “Eight Minutes, Twenty Seconds” is beautiful and heartbreaking and authentic and hopeful. It is well-crafted and impossible to pause in reading. It’s a play that haunts you for days after reading.

Two-handers are so hard, and this is such a good one! Skillfully constructed, funny, and ultimately intensely moving.

A fantastic dynamic between this couple, utterly engaging and keeps us spell bound. Magnificent dialogue and engaging story. Well done!

This play is utterly engaging. The characters are well drawn, and they experience a crisis in their marriage, quite believably, without bathos or easy answers. Actors will cherish these roles.

This two-hander is a departure for Yearley, most of whose plays have bigger casts, sprawling structures and a variety of settings. Here, we are with one couple on one night. And yet, the stakes couldn't be higher. What's so lovely about this play, really, is the humanity of it. Neither Bo nor Ruth is blameless. Both are utterly lost. And yet, somehow, by play's end, we believe that these two, who have wrestled and struggled and damaged each other so deeply... we believe that these two may actually be each other's best hope for happiness. This is a gorgeous play.

A married couple goes through a long dark night of the soul, and it's a gripping journey. This marriage feels lived-in, each person vividly real, complex, and human. John Yearley avoids all the pitfalls of exposition between people who know each other well, and allows backstory, secrets, lies, and half-truths to be revealed in ways that feel entirely natural -- without ever losing their dramatic punch. In this battle of wits, wills, and hearts, what could "winning" even look like? This smart, suspenseful, sad, and beautifully humane play manages exactly the right answer.