The play is somewhat of a Herculean task, as epics tend to be. It's a play that almost requires you to develop a relationship with it to fully understand and take in. As such a play that plays with time, space, gender, and personification, every audience member gets something different out of it. I saw this play a couple times at Binghamton University, which worked to its benefit. Having a whole department digest this play over the course of a semester made it such a remarkable shared experience. Recommended especially for universities.

As someone who read The Discovery of Jeanne Baret by Glynis Ridley, I was thrilled to see how L brought this source material to life. I loved the inventive use of the ensemble of Askers and the multiple Jean/nes. L covers a lot of historical ground while also creating a piece that speaks very much to contemporary audiences. It's a gripping exploration of identity and historiography and sexual politics.

L M Feldman's Thrive, or What You Will is indeed an epic, a worldly, sweeping story about the 18th century French herb woman Jeanne Baret, who pretends to be a man in order to board an exploratory ship bound for the "Great Southern Continent." This is a brilliantly told, steel-edged tale about what the worst of men can do and what the rest of us fail to do about it.