←Recommendations of FUKT

A powerful play. Raw and real. Compelling, disturbing, and also compassionate. Produce this play.

FUKT pulls no punches. A gritty, honest play about trauma from abuse, coming to terms with it, and forgiving your past self. I was fortunate to catch a virtual reading not too long ago, and I look forward to seeing it onstage!

FUKT is the kind of play that makes you feel less alone. It's hard to say something that hasn't already been said in its many recommendations, but it feels important to me after reading such an extraordinary piece as this one, to say something. FUKT is a story of honesty and compassion, including with and for yourself, when those things are most difficult to offer. As these three versions of one woman learn how to be less alone together, so do I.

Fukt is a powerful exploration of the way trauma echoes throughout one’s life and the internal dissonance it can create. Emma Goldman Sherman goes dark, unsettling, deeply honest places. The type of honesty you have to lean into because it reveals human truths that normally stay hidden. It’s a story of being a survivor that is inventively and intelligently told with humor and depth and will stay with you for a long time.

FUKT is a moving, funny, disturbing, and surprisingly hopeful play!
The story is heartbreaking but told with such honesty, energy and theatricality
that it sweeps you up. An important new play that should be seen by many people.

A raw, honest evaluation of how the personas we adopt to replace past selves are not always able to repair the trauma deep down. A one-woman show hijacked by two other earlier versions of the playwright's past, this striking evaluation of the self is theatrical, haunting, and often laugh-out-loud funny.

Devastating, brave, theatrical, AND humorous. A really great piece. Honest and haunting.

Playwrights Foundation congratulates FUKT as a Finalist for BAPF 2020. This play rose to the top 35 out of 735 plays submitted, and was discussed at length by our Bay Area Literary Council for consideration in our season. We loved how this play uses the language of theater to illuminate challenging perspectives and compelling intersectional questions. This play ultimately moved & inspired us and spoke to the core mission of PF. We hope that once we’re allowed to return to our theaters again, it will be considered for production to reach new audiences.

Emma Goldman-Sherman is one of our bravest playwrights, and this play is an example of that. Deeply personal, unabashedly honest, and a great vehicle for three actresses of varying ages. The play reflects the fractured state of its protagonist-- a woman who is trying to tell her own story, but often gets in her own way. As memories and perspectives collide, a portrait of a woman coming to terms with her lack of control in life emerges, and what is an occasionally dark and heavy play becomes a glowing testament to the human spirit.

I had expected to see a staged reading of this play around this time (April 2020), but the virus prevented that. Even so, I can only add my own endorsement to the many this piece has received. For all the harrowing subject matter (incest, illness, murder), the play always delivers on the comedy as well, especially the fighting and quarreling between the three women who are all aspects of the author. Comedy is in fact the play's great strength, without which it could easily become a tearjerker which it decidedly is not. "Oddly uplifting" is the author's apt description.