←Recommendations of Conversations with Big Black Women In Confined Spaces

Really incredible play. These glowing recommendations say it all. This play needs to be produced.

A wonderful play about people we so rarely see on stage. Each character is crafted with so much nuance and heart.

A moving play following four women make their way in their journey in life, relationships and their image of themselves. Well done.

A fast-moving, compelling piece four incredibly complex, layered, amazing lead characters that you can't help but empathize with. There is something exquisite about seeing these four friends with disparate hopes, dreams, and goals connect, struggle, hurt, and heal in this central place of the sauna. In a number of amazingly written group scenes, Rose shows how these characters' Blackness, gender, and weight shape and dictate their various relationships, self-image, and actions. These naturalistic scenes are punctuated by moments of direct address, theatricality, group movement, and song that shape the piece. I'd love to see this wonderful play onstage!

This wonderfully written story of friends, their failures and triumphs, their strengths and weaknesses, resonates. They push each other’s buttons, they call each other out, and the story sweeps you up in their world, their hopes and their realities. A great ensemble piece.

You start reading and the play takes off. There is no role in here among the four women that is the lesser of the other. Stacey Rose creates characters that move you, baffle you, empathize, smile and hurt with them. Rose's use of ritual and space and the use of the scene's elements to set the mood of the scene...you could go on about the many wonderful layers in this piece. You would think that a play this substantial with so much emotional depth would be longer, but Rose economizes words and maximizes impact in this remarkable, stunning play.

Premiere Stages, the professional Equity theatre in residence at Kean University, is pleased to recognize “As Is” by Stacey Rose as a semifinalist for the 2018 Premiere Play Festival. “As Is” rose through a competitive selection process conducted by Premiere staff and a panel of outside theatre professionals to become one of 22 semifinalists out of 572 submissions. The panel was particularly impressed by its smart, lively dialogue, its narrative centering of “big black women,” and its imaginative use of ritual and space to create drama and tension among the sharply drawn characters. Our congratulations and thanks to Stacey.