←Recommendations of Potato Salad with Raisins (Monologue)

You can feel the desperation in Claudine's plea to her husband to come out and eat. She creates a picture of a man at his lowest. She's trying to be brave, but you think she's going to break at any minute. This monologue goes right to the gut.

Wow! Wow! WOW! So many artistic nuances in this play. And it punches you right in the gut. Everyone needs to reaed this. Wow! Take a bow, Paul Donnelly.

For the second time Claudine has lost a son to senseless gun violence. She swears this time around she is not going to have an emotional breakdown. As she describes all the wonderful (six types of brownies) and strange (the title dish) food her friends and neighbors have brought in, she seems to hold herself together. But throughout, one can sense that an explosion is waiting just below the surface calm. Really terrific work.

If you didn’t know what it was about (and if you haven’t seen the synopsis, read the monologue cold), you might expect a comedy.

It begins with a sense of comic absurdity, even though we know a death has occurred. What we don’t know, what we find out, is that death is a fragment lodged in a deep, bloody, unjust societal wound.

Donnelly gives Claudine another miracle: exquisitely contained rage! She has lost too much for surrender to be an option. Not for her. Not for the surviving members of her family.

Intimate, incendiary, unforgettable.

A woman's plea to her husband to eat after the death of their son in a school shooting, this monologue would be a smorgasbord for any actress who touches it. The last few lines will stay with you.

In this beautifully composed monologue, Paul Donnelly, creates a moving and utterly believable story which offers a view of the devastating result of a school shooting. The silence of the Father also speaks volumes about how grief can affect people so differently. Donnelly writes so exquisitely about human suffering; it is writing that stays with you.

"Let the anger sustain you!" That was my feeling when I got to the end of reading this wonderfully powerful but tragic piece. The vast collection of dishes in the kitchen has become a symbol associated with death and in this case it symbolises so much more than that. It symbolises a father's pain in losing his son, it symbolises a mother's pain and struggle to try and care for her husband while mourning her son and it symbolises a community coming together in support after a tragedy. Paul has done amazing work all that and much more together!

Paul Donnelly's excellent monologue explores school shootings through the grief of a mother who lost both of her sons to gun violence. It's a grief that too many parents have had to experience and even more dread that they may. Kudos to Paul for giving such a powerful and voice to this unfortunately necessary part of modern American life.

A powerful, timely monologue, providing much food for thought!

So much pain. So much death. So much food. This monologue brings one mother's outrage to life after losing her children to senseless violence. BRAVO!