←Recommendations of Return to Mother's Nest

The pacing and slow reveals that build throughout RETURN TO MOTHER'S NEST make this play deeply engaging and thrilling. Samantha Marchant uses dialogue with a sharpness that truly cuts deep between mother and daughter. There's an amazing sense of urgency and dread in this play, building toward an ending that would be amazing to watch and hear on stage with both voice and sound effects. A thriller indeed!

A disturbing dark comic look at Mothers, daughters and the ties that bind. Samantha Marchant's creepy short play slowly increases the dread factor while the dialogue pace seems to increase until that final nightmarish end. This would be great to see alongside a bunch of other horror-themed plays.

RETURN TO MOTHER’S NEST is eerie, mysterious, and trenchant. I read it once, mulled it over and read it a second time, and I’m still letting its words creep around in my mind. If you love plays that explore Mother’s dark side (and I do) this is the short play for you. I admire the tug-of-war between familiar mother-daughter talk and something truly bizarre going on. Fine work that would be so much fun to see staged.

What a terrifying trip! This is the kind of theatre that I am interested in. What starts out as a pretty normal conversation between a mother and her adult daughter slowly descends into surreal cult behavior. With uncanny dialogue, a fantastic build, and descriptions that would tickle the creative bone of a designer, "Return to Mother's Nest" is a cult play that will give you the 'creepy crawlies.'

I am sufficiently creeped out. This is a play that is ready to get invested in quickly. The dead build so slowly that you barely notice it before it has a stranglehold on you. Great writing.

I am...utterly terrified in the best possible way! The complete chaos as Madison tries to engage the chaos of Crystal's mind. As I read I imagined the dialogue getting faster and faster, almost like a train that you can sense is going to derail at some point. This play presents you with heart pounding tension and you will want to read it more than once (I did). It would make an amazing piece that will leave an audience breathless in a great way! Brilliantly constructed.

I’m both excited and terrified to see what a sound designer does with this! I can’t wait to see what a director with a good sense for ground plans does to create this setting (an unfinished house) which needs to be simultaneously realistic and impressionistic.

That said, the play is nuts! Marchant gets us off and running with the character descriptions! What begins as a kind of intergeneration comedy – sorta FAMILY TIES on acid – becomes increasingly yet stealthily more bizarre. And we just roll with it until there’s no turning back. Great sleight of hand!

Poor Madison really can't go home again. In spare, evocative language, Samantha Marchant crafts a powerful narrative of a mother and daughter who have lost touch struggling to reconnect. Or connect anew. The connection they end up making is dark and creepy and built to with enormous subtlety.

The thing I love about this short piece is what's not said. There is so much that Samantha Marchant hints at but never tells us, mixed with with brilliantly evocative language and character descriptions (Madison, dressed like the Avenue; Crystal, dressed like the gem: brilliant), which aches and yearns for a time past that is tangible but beyond reach, set in a halfway space that is an unfinished home that acts as metaphor for the place these characters find themselves in. Beautifully unsettling.

How do you go home to a place that no longer exists for you, neither physically nor metaphorically? The playwright keeps us guessing with this beautiful and disturbing exchange between mother and daughter. So much of the past cleverly hinted at and an immediate future that's truly creepy,