←Recommendations of Welcome to Fear City

A powerful look into family, community and the weight of fear as a young man longs for peace and to live the best he can. Well done.

A play with a talking rat, the Bronx burning--and hip-hop! Ruthless real-estate profiteering stalks in the background, pushing a young black man to make a dangerous choice. I loved the nuanced characters, the vivid sense of a time and place, and the fierce fire at the heart of this play. Wry, funny, tragic, and scalpel-sharp in its dissection of the ties that bind--both family and community. A gorgeous play.

It is the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's pleasure to recommend Kara Lee Corthron and their play Welcome to Fear City 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 finalist out of hundreds of submissions, the strength of this play’s writing has allowed this work to prosper in such a competitive selection process.

Outstanding. Bold, confident, hyper-realistic and at times surreal. A riveting look at lives in a Bronx housing project in the '70s that's all too current, as the playwright connects the failed and fiery hopes and small victories of a family to slaves longing for freedom and movie stereotypes of African Americans. Strong, engaging characters in seamless scenes that end at the perfect moment. Full of naturally erupting music, movement and spectacle, this will be a thought-provoking and exhilarating piece of theatre.

We are pleased to support this play! It was a Finalist for the 2016 New Works Festival at Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas, Texas.

Welcome to Fear City is a brilliant new play that explores hip-hop, race, and representation in a provocatively theatrical way. Also the rat is amazing!