←Recommendations of be mean to me

A moving and intimate look at girlhood and female friendships.

Oh hey. Sofya Levitsky-Weitz wrote a play about my best friend from high school and me. There's so much universality within the specificity here of the things young women struggle with in their teens and 20s, and I love how the story toggles back and forth in time between Jean and Meril at 17 and 27. It's a wonderful study of two girls trying to make it to adulthood unscathed, the things that haunt them, and how easy it is to be casually cruel to the ones you love the most. So great!

I read this play in one sitting because I couldn't put it down. The way Levitsky-Weitz plays with time in this piece is masterful, and paints a beautiful (scary) picture of friendship, and how the ones we love can sometimes hurt us the most.

17 and 27 are pretty similar, and that's scary. So are ghosts and Bright Eyes. Love a good toxic female friendship story.

An amazingly rendered portrait of two women with a masterful use of theatrical devices--direct address, malleable chronology--to tell the story. Levitsky-Weitz tackles so much here--the intricacies of female friendship; the ways society can both pit women against one another and hold them back individually; the artistic and creative process; how men can have a leech-like, deleterious effect on women working hard to self-actualize exert their personal and professional power; friendship and the passage of time. I very much was in awe of all the little seismic relationship shifts communicated here that amounted to a wholly engrossing, subtle narrative.

Premiere Stages, the professional Equity theatre in residence at Kean University, is pleased to recognize “be mean to me” by Sofya Levitsky-Weitz as a semifinalist for the 2019 Premiere Play Festival. “be mean to me” rose through a competitive selection process conducted by Premiere staff and a panel of outside theatre professionals to become one of 23 semifinalists out of 659 submissions. The panel was particularly impressed by the deft, deeply moving characterization of the two young women at the play’s heart, and by the elegant, fluid way the play shifts between time periods. Our congratulations and thanks to Sofya.