←Recommendations of Welcome to Keene, New Hampshire

“Welcome to Keene, New Hampshire” takes a page from Thornton Wilder’s seminal play “Our Town” and transports us to a real-life small town in Southern New Hampshire. However, Polak’s play goes deeper to explore wider social issues, such as alt-right movements, gun violence, the opioid epidemic, and trans identity, each treated with the right amount of weight and attention. This play is also rife with snarky humor and poignant musings about our place in the universe. A messy play that doesn’t offer easy answers and allows the audience to contemplate life itself. Wonderful work!

A fantastic, Our Town- esque portrait of a community and humanity in this modern America. Brian does an excellent job of giving so many characters careful attention and moments on stage. I loved this piece!

A revealing play about life in a small town and humanity in this political time. Well done.

As a native New Englander, this play felt like family to me. I felt like I knew each and every one of these characters, and of course saw so many glimpses of my teenage self in the young, hopeful characters...while also feeling the weariness of the older ones. The play honors the spirit of Our Town, but it is in conversation with it rather than simply derived from it. I cannot wait to see this come to life on stage.

Unlike Wilder's "Our Town," Polak centers outsiders in his ode to small town life. In doing so, he finds a more meaningful representation of the "universal meets the specific." In combining meta theatricality, song, collage style scenes, and direct address, Polak both honors and subverts Wilder's work. Compelling, funny, poignant work.

Brian James Polak has taken a time-tested classic American drama and reimagined it to feel incredibly urgent and necessary. He honors the ancestral bones of his source material, yet makes this New England town vibrant with contemporary life- in all its faults and quirks. A powerful examination of small town life, revealing human truths in a wider lens. Beautifully crafted. Very much looking forward to seeing this staged.

I really dig this play. Complex characters and the intimacy of their lives in an updated Our Town-like structure.

This gorgeous reimagining of OUR TOWN manages to be simultaneously incisive and subtle, inevitable and elliptical, communal and intimate. Polak invokes a constellation of anxieties about life in small town America with great compassion and tenderness. WELCOME TO KEENE, NEW HAMPSHIRE is a wry, moving, timely, and quietly forceful play.

As others have said, the echoes of Thornton Wilder are loud and clear in this accurate, break your heart tribute to all those New England towns that are broken down shadows of their former glories. Brian James Polak's play creates quietly memorable characters as they go about stultifying existences, dreaming of escape. There is both irony and tragedy in their stories, and the whole piece is nicely held together by a parking attendant narrator who presides over both the living and dead. A play for our times, speaking clearly about the dangers of exhausted slogans and unheeded cries for help.

It's hard to read (or, I imagine watch) this play without also hearing echos of Wilder's "Out Town" . That's clearly intentional, and the sharp contrast between his idyllic 1900's town and Polak's deftly drawn characters and anxious political atmosphere make this play particularly important for today's theatre. Fascinatingly, Polak manages to find humor and a subtle kind of optimism in his broken American town. An important show that I'd love to see on a college stage.