What makes a good person? Vince Gatton’s darkly comic existential road trip play doesn’t offer easy answers, but it does one better: it allows us to wonder.

YOU HAVE EARNED BONUS STARS is most powerful in its theatrical dream sequences, revealing its protagonist’s repressed shame and self-recrimination alongside a+ visual punchlines (a priest, a rabbi and an imam walk onto a plane…).

Surviving violence—or not—doesn’t erase your past or wipe clean your karmic slate. The beauty of YHEBS is in how it not only contends with nuance and moral ambiguity, it revels in it.

Conventions of good taste in theatre would tell you you shouldn't make a play this plotty. They'd say plays that have this many twists and turns are tedious and would work better on the screen. Pay those "well-made-play" rules no mind. Upon reading "You Have Earned Bonus Stars", the reader's glad they're being pulled along through a journey rather than sitting through another living room or debate play. It forces the actors, and director to take chances, make decisions. The play snakes into dark places—places darker than one would expect. But I like that kind of thing.

What a road trip! Gatton pulls us along through this nightmare of gun violence and the heaviness of being human and the weight of the moral obligation of a debt to be repaid. These are beautifully crafted, complex characters; Morrison's "Love is never better than the lover” came to mind. Gatton wraps us up in the nightmares so much so you'll need to take a deep breath at the end of each and every one.