←Recommendations of The Window

Whatever human is living with Fish and Cat has no idea what they are missing. An improbable friendship. A lesson in life. A knowledge that is all pared down. The sun rises. The sun sets. And there we go. Yes, absurd. But can absurd have a tender side? I hope wherever you are, the gravel is edible and you have a friendship close to what Fish and Cat have.

The Window deserves all of the praise it's receiving and more. It's a high-water mark of 10-minute plays--intelligent, funny, moving. The characters are so engaging, I was almost mournful as I hit the last page, as it meant my time with the Cat and the Fish were done. It's a piece that stays with you, and one I hope will be widely produced.

FISH and CAT have everything between them, and a vast, wide emptiness, in their big/little apartment world. Canfield explores the dynamics between these two cautionary besties, I mean, a FISH and a CAT coexisting? After a month of quarantining, I can't help read this play through that lens. I never thought I could get so excited about gravel, but I was reading up on gravel deliveries just today! Does that make me the fish? Which one are you? Prescient, relatable, and chockfull of steel-eyed observations. A great pick for your next festival. It would also be brilliant on Zoom.

So much is going on in this short piece it makes my head swim – and I love that about it. It's a dazzling, surreal bit of wonderfully layered wordplay, as funny as it is serious, and as absurd as it is sensible. Great roles, great potential for creative direction and design, and just a great time that I'm sure plays even better than it reads – which is pretty damn great.

As charming as it is absurd. As absurd as it is funny. A terrific piece with much more to it than first appears.

What a charming and funny play. And it takes on so much more meaning now in the new normal of confinement and self-quarantine with Cat and Fish making their own rules of the game as they watch the world around them. I can see why this won the Audience Favorite at the festival. It's become one of mine.

A delightfully absurdist piece which deftly and cleverly, examines the extremes of living in the now and the over-examined life. It was like a Gary Larson cartoon brought to the stage. SO funny! This would be a crowd pleaser in a night of short plays - both highly entertaining while also touching on some deeper questions about the human experience (while never letting on that it is doing so).

A delightfully funny play contrasting the jaded world view of a cat with the childlike wonder of a fish, while offering insight into the great questions of philosophy: why are we here? what can we hope to accomplish? and why did that woman drive on the median strip?

All the comments below are dead-on, but consider also the inventiveness of characterization and dialogue with which Tristen Canfield distinguishes the limited consciousness of Sherman the fish with the far greater awareness of Wuzzums the cat. And yet even so the fish bowl and apartment are but the tiniest of settings far removed from the world outside with its car accidents and what-not. This is a brilliant philosophical debate about the nature of consciousness, friendship, death, and the limitations of all creatures' ability to grasp the world.

There's a lot to unpack here in a very short read, and I could probably spend an hour or two doing so! But my biggest takeaway is of course they're friends, or Fish would be dead. Even that is a heavy concept.