←Recommendations of Walden

A gift for three actors. Huge questions of survival lovingly played out between three humans. Berryman's vision and prose are treasures. Highly recommend.

This play is the most powerful type of sci-fi, where the fiction in the story feels like a reality of our times. Amy has created a story that embraces the inevitability of our future and has entwined it all within a huge beating heart. A gorgeous meditation on family and colonization, highly recommended.

A beautiful, poetic, and haunting play about the bond between siblings, wanting to know more about the universe, and the reality of being human on a dying planet. I was so compelled right from the jump - especially with the central question of do we try to save the planet we live on now, or cut our losses and start over again somewhere else? The subject matter is haunting, current, and vital - and this play deftly navigates the reality of climate change without being overly political or preachy. PRODUCE IT!

Walden succeeds in high-concept speculative fiction and as an intimate look at living in a time of crisis. With an unshakeable emotional core and three crystal-clear, fully realized characters, Berryman plumbs the depths of emotional exploration in family and in a culture hurtling towards ruin. Produce this play while there's still time and world to produce it in!

This play is gentle and devastating at the same time. It expertly weaves together two problems that many of us try our damndest to ignore: climate change and sibling dynamics, forcing us not only to pay attention, but to make space for hope, love, and optimism in both scenarios. It is a play that helps us imagine what happens if we open our hearts to the people we've known our whole lives, and the people we may never know but share the same fate as us on our little planet. Produce it!

Walden is one of those rare plays that is both cosmically huge and refreshingly small at once, displaying an easy-going complexity of ideas and relationships that invest you deeply in both its world and its characters. The central bond, between two sisters who can't leave each other's orbit but are lightyears apart, is riveting and funny and sad and visceral and a whole lot of other adjectives that render them sink-your-teeth-in roles for any pair of actresses. And the story swirling around them, of how we move on from the world or save it, is (pun intended) totally stellar.

The themes in this play are themes that have been a part of theatre since the Greeks. Themes like family, resentment, destiny, fear and hope. Amy Berryman has beautifully created a future our world is heading towards as the backdrop for this story. It's the best kind of science fiction. The kind that presents massive ideas and scenarios our current minds can't exactly comprehend but what we can comprehend is the intimate drama between these 3 multi-faceted characters. The final scene is breathtaking and left me with a multitude of emotions. Can't wait to see this play fully produced.

Premiere Stages, the professional Equity theatre in residence at Kean University, is pleased to recognize “Walden” by Amy Berryman as the runner-up for the 2019 Premiere Play Festival. “Walden” rose through a competitive selection process conducted by Premiere staff and a panel of outside theatre professionals encompassing 659 submissions. The panel was particularly impressed by the play’s vivid presentation of a world endangered by climate change, its evocation of the beauty of nature, and the warm, compassionately drawn trio at its heart. The play will receive a staged reading at Premiere in June 2019. Our congratulations and thanks to Amy.

This play is so beautiful! The characters are vivid and true. The plot is expertly paced, as the tension between the sisters ratchets up with every new revelation. And the story is emotionally wrenching, right up through the final moments of the play. I saw a reading of this play at the Valdez Theatre Conference, where the audience was on the edge of their seats. This is the kind of play we desperately need, as the coming century asks us to grapple with our deepest fears, hopes, and beliefs in the face of climate change.

Well drawn characters and a very moving last scene. It balances an intimate family drama with epic concepts wonderfully.