←Recommendations of Happy Birthday Mars Rover

Great ensemble piece with so many exciting staging opportunities! It is an existential journey through time (and almost space) with whimsy, humor, and a bit of dread. The play captures the joy and sadness that can result from the hunger for knowledge and progress.

What is the meaning of life? "Happy Birthday Mars Rover" is a genius play that explores humanity's search for an answer to this question through space and time and the tragedy of our tendency to run into extinction events and adjust to the new normal. This is one of the best plays I have read. It's poignant and very funny, and I would love to see a full production of it!

I think the best stories about the end of the world are the ones that are ultimately uplifting. A character remarks that everything looks so small flying in the air and are met with the response that no, everything IS small, you just weren't able to see it before. This play wrestles with huge themes nimbly and beautifully, skipping stones across a deep ocean.

A brilliant play that looks at periods of history from the dawn of man to a bleak future for the human race. The stage directions in this piece feel like poetry as they perfectly set the tone for each vignette. This play really tackles all aspects of what it's like to be human. There is love and death. There is hope and dread. It really makes you wonder what impact the human race truly had on this planet. I can't wait to see this play performed by an adventuraous ensemble of actors and a resourceful design team.

A play balanced perfectly on the fence between romantic sentimentality and yawning nihilism. Intergalactic in scope, yet constructed from dozens of tiny, intricately detailed scenes, which speak to so much more beyond the text. Choi's stark screed against the seemingly impermeable reign of humanity has the counterintuitive effect of capturing the brief, fragile beauty of being granted a life. The script has only grown richer since its pre-pandemic debut.

I saw this play in Chicago, just before the pandemic hit, and it is a wonderful, undefinable play touching seamlessly on a zillion aspects of what it means to be human, with some climate change warnings thrown in as well. That last oral report on an extinct animal is one I still think about. This play is unique and terrific, and I hope it has many more productions to come.