←Recommendations of M and The Water Man

My aboute favorite episode on the Twilight Zone is the Midnight Sun and Vaughn writes what could be a sequel to that television classic here with M and the Water Man. A continuation of that theme of the world moving closer to the sun and yet the nightmare doesn’t go away as with that television show but stays with you at the end. Well done!

I am generally not a sci-fi fan or a fan of plays about romantic love, but this play pulled me in with its honesty, its sense of ritual (yes!), its language/pacing/rhythms, its strangeness and its urgency. I like the ideas in the play that feel epic even in such a short period of time. Well done!

Through every tragedy and every crisis, love endures. Hannah Vaughn creates a world of spare language where nothing is wasted like you don't waste water in a desert. It may well all be ending and nights grow longer with days so endlessly long, but through it all love endures. It's a wonderful play living in circumstances that are all too frighteningly possible, and the playwright creates a scenario that is all too human in its response to the crisis.

Tautly bound yet deeply felt, this moving sci-fi play pierces beyond the fantastical into a realm where emotion can be explored, where character and motivation are defined with the scantest poetry. This play is a requiem, a saga of a death foretold. Exquisite and lovely, biting and clear - Vaughn lifts the energy up higher and higher, and then lets us fall, slowly, inevitably. The writer even discovers meaning in the quiet.

A spare and beautiful piece that uses silences as eloquently as speech to paint a vibrant picture of a bleak reality. A dystopian drama that is by turns harrowing, all too believable, and surprisingly hopeful, all anchored in a pair of characters who we connect to easily, even if we haven't suffered what they've suffered.

As someone who writes sci-fi myself, I appreciate good world building and when the playwright manages to remember that the characters are fully formed people beyond the requirements of the sci-fi premise. Vaughn paints indelible characters with the barest of brush strokes, hurt survivors defined by their boundaries.

In a future where even the cacti have burnt up, Hannah Vaughn manages to spin a talk of love, grief, and guilt. Written with a dearth of language that perfectly fits a world without respite, M and The Water Man finds two characters on the edge of existence, desperately clinging to whatever they can to make it through. A touching Sci-fi tale that more than delivers.

A very simple, human and touching play. Sci-fi with a heart. Vaughn writes dialogue as sparse and strong as the desert setting. "Your cacti are black. Don’t you see? And your lizards are burned to a crisp. Only bones left outside." sums up the world of this play. Love it.