←Recommendations of EGG IN SPOON

Such a great play! Metaphor Galore! Humor! Surprise! Truth! Carnes takes the stage and uses it to make us notice - we can't look away - and then she throws us into a blackout so we can ponder it.

Wow. This all too timely play really caught me off guard. Carnes' witty dialogue and well-drawn female characters draw you in, but just when you think you know what this play is, it takes one unexpected turn and then another, with devastating results. Extremely well crafted.

Four generations of women in a near future that is a little too possible for my tastes. Even with the dystopian anti-women overtones of the world built, the thing referenced afterwards most throughout the weekend of the Midwest Dramatists Conference was the great grandma getting sex lessons in the nursing home.

Yep, I'm another one who caught and admired this at the 2019 Midwest Dramatists Conference. Rachael Carnes has a gift for mixing quirky humor with dark themes and questions, and this is yet another triumph. Four women -- four generations -- a picnic, and what should be something of a happy occasion eventually yields a lot of pain, fear, and guilt. But who's ultimately responsible? And why are they interested in what those kids are doing nearby? A wonderfully mysterious piece that's easily staged.

I know I'm just one voice of many praising this show, but Rachel did it again with this one! It's sharp, witty, very original and unflinching. I didn't see anything coming and I wasn't ready for the ending. Great work here.

A thought-provoking cautionary tale wrapped in a deft comedy, Egg in Spoon is that rare ten-minute play that goes places the audience does not foresee. A reading I recently saw at the Midwest Dramatists Conference ignited much deserved enthusiasm and discussion from the audience.

Carnes writes about sexuality from the perspective of four generations of women gathered at a baby shower for the youngest among them. The setting provides a delicate counterpoint to the trauma of a near-future scenario in which repression runs rampant. Egg in Spoon provides great lines and distinctive characters as it explores the troubling possibility of what could happen if our current leadership fails women.

I saw this play read at the Midwest Dramatist Conference and loved it! It always makes me happy to see predominantly female casts, but this piece also gives us and an all female casts with four women of different generations and perspectives. Rachael Carnes skillfully reveals bit by bit exactly what kind of world these women live in and why. Both hilarious and haunting, "Egg in Spoon" is a well-crafted delicacy I won't soon forget.

One thing not always pointed out in Rachael Carnes's work is what I would call a pointillistic technique. Apparently isolated phrases and sentences leap out and we're not aware at first where they're going, but gradually the fragments start to imply an overall theme. For this reason one has to be attuned to Rachael's particular approach to structure, which comes across very effectively in "Egg in Spoon." That said, let us not overlook the sharply delineated characterizations, particularly great-grandma Eleanor's irreverently open wisecracks on female masturbation.

This play is both incredibly beautiful and haunting at the same time. What begins as something that should be joyous, becomes a cold reminder that if we are not paying attention to the decisions we are making now, of the daunting future that could lay ahead of us. This play is a reminder of the possible future we could encounter - a reminder that in order to keep the things that should be happy just that, we must act.