←Recommendations of Sheltered

A moving look at the journey to save as many as one can and the choices involved. Powerful and well done.

What's great about SHELTERED is how often it remembers its characters' complex humanity -- doubt, hope, anger, eagerness, and regret all pulsate throughout the play with a fine touch. Knowing that the genre of WWII and European migration is familiar territory, Alix Sobler's play makes the smart choice to focus on the microcosm of what it means to sacrifice and how the notion to aid in another's plight is only the start of your own. The Kirschs are not only noble, but flawed, funny, and strikingly realistic. SHELTERED builds up a promise, then delivers in unexpected, beautifully subtle ways.

Sheltered starts off as a delightful period comedy of manners, then just keeps deepening until you find yourself staring fully into the abyss. One of those rare period plays that succeeds in making you see both the past and the present in a new light. A devastating play about the choices we make and the sacrifices that catastrophe forces us to face. It manages to be funny and smart, charming and humane all the way through, taking the reader on a journey that left me gasping.

Part of what's so impressive about this play, to me, is how Sobler crystallizes a broad and depthless historical tragedy into an utterly clear dramatic moment. That ability allows her, without crowding the play with nudges or winks or post-modern tricks, to draw unmistakeable connections to today, and to eternal questions of moral responsibility and of courage. She takes a something overwhelming and brings it right back to a (tense, funny) dinner with neighbors, to the (beautifully drawn) inner dynamics of a marriage, to the (heartbreaking) connection between two women.

I found Sheltered completely engrossing and felt as if I needed to get through the play before a ticking time bomb went off. I'm so impressed with her ability to capture not only the spirit of a frightening time in history but dropping subtle hints at the fact that we're on the threshold of that same history repeating. Her play is smart, well constructed, and provides strong, conflicted characters that make for what would truly be a powerful and poignant evening of theatre.

There are many choices to be made in Sheltered and Sobler lays them out with all the imperfections that occur when you are “doing the right thing.” Do you take a child from a loving home in Nazi-occupied Austria to a probable abusive home in the USA? What do humans owe to fellow humans fleeing a violent country? These questions fill our history books and provide few answers. A timely play that gives us good people striving to help. Is saving one person enough? Forty? What can one person do when governments refuse to help? A very thoughtful play.

The Act I Evelyn/Roberta confrontation recognizes no easy choices, no perfect outcomes. But year 1939 demands decisions, actions, in order to change 40 destinies for the better. Act II finds the Kirsches in Vienna besieged by fear, disagreements, exhaustion and the visit of an Austrian mother. Evelyn and Hani Mueller test each other’s views, motives, finally agreeing that Hani’s son will be sheltered from the Nazi storm of violence. Only to be unsheltered from possible domestic violence in Roberta's home. A fact only Evelyn knows of and must work to prevent. Alix Sobler’s complex play is compelling theater.

Besides just being an extremely well-crafted play, this piece is one of the most timeliest plays I've read in recent years. It asks big questions and gives us characters that do noble things sometimes through less than noble means. Using a fictionalized version of a story that so few have heard of from WWII, Sobler asks to look at what our nation's place in helping the world is. A play that should be seen everywhere but especially in Red States.

A wonderful play that is, unfortunately, very timely. Alix Sobler's harrowing play examines the difficult decisions people are forced to make in times of crisis, and how just a few people can change the lives of many.

I can’t get over what a fantastic idea for a play this is. And it’s so beautifully executed. Powerful, poignant, and never maudlin. Nothing about this play is overdone. The characters and the circumstances speak for themselves.