←Recommendations of The Widow of Tom's Hill

A haunting script filled with atmospheric tension and mystery. Aleks paints this world so vividly, you can almost hear the sea and taste the fog. It's a love story and a ghost story and an apocalyptic tale from a century ago. Perfect fall fare!

I love the way Merilo starts out conspiratorially bringing us into the story as witnesses. Then a fairy tale. Then blood and gore. All bring us deeper into the mysteries and magic of this beautifully unfolding story.
A blending and blurring of boundaries that speaks to the past year of quarantine and the future in terms of how and who do we trust? I enjoyed every syllable of this exquisite play, so theatrical in its images and language.

A gorgeous love story, so beautifully written that captures a whirl of emotion swirling out of a pandemic. Well done!

A beautiful, haunting, lyrical play. And although it was written in 2014, the world Aleks Merilo created when writing about the plague in 1918 resonates eerily with what the world is going through with covid-19. A piece that sticks with you long after the final page. I think it also allows a theatre to present a play that uses the shared emotional experience we've all had without walloping an audience over the head with current events. Really gorgeous and worth the read!

A very lyrical play with lots of poetic prose and a few songs. The suspense was killing me but I didn't want this play to end. Meanwhile it's a love story with sweeping scenery and enough tragedy to make you cry. What more could a great play have?

Beautifully crafted, Aleks Merilo's frighteningly prescient allegory is told with mounting suspense, heightened by his stunning use of language that is at once both raw and lyrical. A superb work that lingers long after the final page has been turned.

As harrowing as a Greek myth, as resonant as an Irish folk ballad, "The Widow of Tom's Hill" restores an expansive and compelling lyrical vision to the American stage. Merilo writes about the dark cracks of our history and society, people and incidents long since forgotten who inhabit the blind alleyways of our collective memory. In so doing, he challenges us to find beauty anywhere and everywhere. This play will enchant, disturb, and astonish you. You'll feel it in your bones like the raw coastal air.

This is a gorgeous, haunting play that grabs you from the first lines of dialogue and pulls you deeper, scene by scene, into its spell. By the time it's worked through its twists and horrors and brought its characters to a conclusion that feels inescapable, it's achieved a kind of mythic energy and language and risen to the level of the classic American folk-tales. Stunning, poetic language and a compellingly dangerous relationship between its two characters.