←Recommendations of The Volunteer

This play surprises you all along the way. It is funny till it's not. It is absurd until reality hits. It is way out there until it's grounded. Do yourself a favor, sit down with this play and go on a unique ride of your life that theatricalizes a thought that one man had to prevent nuclear war into a bloody theatrical reality.

This play presents a real-life hypothetical solution to the apocalyptic cloud of impulsiveness which all of us live under today. Though The Volunteer is about the potentiality and inhumanity of nuclear war, it also manages to be funny, moving and theatrical while avoiding being cumbersome or necessarily costly, making it ideal for smaller venues who want to do new, innovative work. Propelling the surprising (and even sometimes gruesome) plot twists, choice roles for actors and clean, often funny dialogue is a guiding urgency which the audience will take home. It's important. Don't just read it. Produce it.

I have had the pleasure of hearing two readings of this play; the first at Chicago Dramatists as part of the First Draft Reading Series and the second at Prop Thtr in Chicago. Both drafts made me catch my breath. Cassandra Rose deftly humanizes institutions and processes that are historically sterile and opaque to civilians like myself: the Pentagon, the Secret Service, and specifically "the biscuit" of nuclear war. Cassandra's heart-breaking characters make a play about the threat of nuclear war a play ultimately a play about hope and the importance of honoring our collective humanity while we still can.

Heard this as part of a Chicago reading series, and Cassandra builds an alternate reality I would both love to live in, and would also be immediately terrified of. The choices made around nuclear war become deeply personal in an intense and hilarious examination of what happens when killing becomes less a theory, and more a practice.

"The Volunteer" offers an interesting and fresh perspective to a hotly debated subject currently making headlines by using inventive theatrics and wall-breaking, surreal playwrighting techniques. Cassandra's characters all feel well-defined in voice and objective. The form in which Cassandra presents "The Volunteer" offers a director and design team limitless opportunities for production design and casting.

I had the good fortune of listening to this at its first public reading, and I could not more highly recommend it. The deep connection to all of the characters is one of its biggest strengths. There is a sense of urgency, fear, chaos, and at the same time, important interpersonal relationships that knit it all together into an excellent excerise in morality. The monologues are superb, the subject matter is well researched, and it's a damn fine work of art.

Wow. I love this innovative play, which makes the audience laugh and cry, wryly winking at them all the while. Many plays begin as a thought experiment in a playwright’s mind, but I haven’t encountered one before that dramatizes the process in such a delightfully metatheatrical way. Highly recommended!

The play begins as a "thought experiment" inspired by an op-ed piece which posed a simple question; what if the President had to murder someone with their bare hands in order to retrieve codes to launch a nuclear strike? Playwright Rose has a knack for witty dialogue, but she also knows how to make a strong, convincing argument. At first presentational and satiric, the narrative deftly morphs into an affecting drama with real-world parallels and consequences, at once mythic and intimate. I love plays like this.