←Recommendations of Recent Unsettling Events

Brave, intensely truthful, and masterfully multi-dimensional, RECENT UNSETTLING BUSINESS puts Netflix’s THE CHAIR to shame. This is the real deal version of that story, which makes Andrea Stolowitz both prescient and brilliant. The play is a masterclass in how to craft a gripping, action-packed story with huge stakes and unexpected reversals, and yet, not a moment of plot. Instead, her tender characters collide out of their own aching needs. Every single moment is earned. Delight in the shifts and turns, the delicate balance of shifting perspectives. Better yet, produce it!!!

Sparking a powerful conversation. The difficult battle to create a world where all are equal asks questions about free speech, identity and who should be speaking as they all face tremendous consequences as a result. Well done.

Recent Unsettling Events is so many things, but first and foremast it is brilliant. Stolowitz demonstrates the complexities of life on a college campus from student to professor to administrator in a way that makes clear nothing is clear. Students fight admirably for agency in their education as professors do their best to please the school and the students while remaining steadfast in their own intellectual pursuits. There are no easy answers and this play leaves you with a great deal to think about when it is over, which is all I want in a play.

A compelling, thorny play that exists at the intersections of race, privilege, power, and protest, not offering easy answers but all the more effective for that. It feels both skeptical of social movements' ability to enact sweeping change against entrenched power structures, but also suggests that such action is necessary, even if ultimately change is piecemeal and slow. A play that's only become more relevant in recent months as demands for systemic change have grown louder.

It is the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's pleasure to recommend Andrea Stolowitz and their play Recent Unsettling Events as a finalist for our 2020 National Playwrights Conference. This particular work emerged from a highly competitive, anonymous, and multi-tiered selection process to become one of 63 finalists out of more than 1,500 submissions. This enthralling piece galvanized the hearts and theatrical imaginations of our reading teams and is fully championed by our offices. We are honored to put our enthusiastic support behind this writer and their ongoing contributions to the American Theater.

Stolowitz has masterfully brought the frantic climate of a campus in crisis onto the stage. RECENT UNSETTLING EVENTS tells an intensely timely story where every side comes forward with the best intentions. The ultimate destiny of the characters remains open for debate: Has political correctness run completely amok? Or is it time that our thought system is burned down and rebuilt? And what kind of collateral damage do we accept in the process? Taut structure and economical storytelling creates moments of great tension, fear, and ultimately hope. This play is a personification of a conversation that needs to be had.

I was super jealous of everyone who got to hear a reading of this remarkable play at the New Dramatists in NYC, so thanks to the magic of NPX, I caught up with this electrifying world, built with equal parts structure and savvy by Stolowitz. This play is ferociously smart, funny, spot-on, a realization of academia's entrenched inequities and foibles, with a cast of deeply drawn characters bashing around the ivory tower. Reading this, I wonder if Stolowitz and I share the same alma mater?? Go, Oregon playwright, Go! Read and produce this play. It's insanely good.

An incisive and wonderfully structured exploration of privilege and of the precarious divide between power and powerlessness that young adults feel as they navigate issues of social justice and identity. With a deeply intersectional cross-section of characters, many perspectives are given their due and equal weight in the thorny, well-drawn, and both humorous and tragic discussions.

Recent Unsettling Events takes a deep hard look at questions of campus speech, re-examination of the Western Canon, and every facet of privilege. And it does so in a brisk, entertaining way that offers no answers, engages audiences, and promotes meaningful conversation. A standout.

The play gives voice to the ways in which the professional and personal consequences of free speech have changed dramatically. The characters push us to ask who can speak for whom in a world where we must consider others’ multiple identities, while also remembering what connects us: a need to be loved and a desire to be understood? The play has no easy answers and although it takes place on a college campus, it asks important questions about the making of art in a world that is trying to account for so many past and present wounds.