←Recommendations of Those Days Are Over

The five sisters in this story could not be more distinctive or unique, with specific quirks and hangups that make them feel profoundly human and dimensional. The magic of this play, other than the structure (and the lemons!), is how much you come to care about and worry for these women. It's consistently funny, which helps make the emergent moments of gut-deep grief feel genuine. As in most of David Hilder's plays, the characters change and grow in the most subtle and sublime ways, always leaving readers with a powerful image. Seldom has catharsis felt both so hard-won and well-earned.

This beautiful play follows five sisters backwards and forwards in time from their mother's death. It is a wonderful combination of poignant and hilarious. Each sister is so different, wrestling with her own demons, and yet they are all one unit as well, thanks to the glue that was their mother. This is a lovely look at growth, dreams, aging, and family. Just a wonderful, wonderful play.

I loved the dynamics, the twists and turns, and the unexpected depths to which this play goes as its layers form more and more nuanced meanings. Hilder has great facility in writing characters I truly care about and the moments that push them and pull them in all the directions during their grief. Fascinating play!

This show feels like the close-knit, complicated family it portrays: intimate, funny, frustrating (in the best ways), heart-wrenching, cathartic. Highly recommend.

"Dynamic, exhilarating, nuanced, heartwarming, RAGEFUL - in a good validating way." These are responses from Ashland New Plays Festival audiences after seeing this unique, vivid play about family, about women, about the lessons we learn, and the lessons we want to unlearn. We are excited to support this ANPF 2020 winner and can't wait for a theatre to consider THOSE DAYS ARE OVER for full production.

A terrific story of grief and sisterhood in all its complexity, frustration and beauty. Excellent!

This play has all the things--like, seriously, it has ALL the things! Cleverness and pathos, comedy and drama, assassins and lesbians and rock music and BIRDS! Mr. Hilder has created a whip-smart novelistic world in which five brilliant women wrestle with grief as they come to terms with their sisterhood. It is at one minute hilarious and the next devastating. Do this play! Your audiences will feel everything, too!

A play that is both awesomely theatrical and immensely human. I just loved the aesthetic/visual/aural world that Hilder creates here. I also love that I really did feel a sense of shifting and change throughout the piece, but that it was devoid of artificial theatrics and, instead, focused on little profound and seismic changes. Funny, poignant, truthful play about the stickiness of family relationships, generational differences, and the social expectations that women grapple with as they try to live and thrive.

This is a lovely play (and full of lovely roles for women in their forties and fifties!). It manages to be both a family drama, full of sympathetic characters and carefully-observed details, and an important reflection on contemporary gender roles. Audiences would love this piece, and would walk away with a lot to think about.

With biting humor, Mr. Hilder has crafted a complex, moving play that utilizes the vast resources of the theatre. Not only that, he has written seven excellent roles for women! This is masterful work.