←Recommendations of The Gift

This is a brilliant and engrossing play that uses the story of a newly married couple in the 1850s to explore how the institution of slavery corrupted the souls of those who owned slaves. It doesn't flinch from exploring how the family and the home were sites of violence during slavery but does so sensitively and compellingly. I highly recommend it and would love to see a full production.

I love how incredibly thoroughly researched this play feels! And, in speaking with the playwright, it's clear that she consumed a lot of literature and really lived in the world of this play for a long time before and while writing. Considering the content, that is an amazing feat of emotional labor.
I highly recommend reading this play and I would love to see it produced!

This is about as good as two-handers get. Uncomfortably relevant, impeccably researched, perfectly shaped. I can absolutely see why this has found its way onto syllabuses, now it's time to get it in actors' hands. Truly a special piece.

A true whirlwind - you really fall for this couple before their inner brutality shows itself...or did we just not want to face it, just as we never truly face the inhumanity happening just off-stage? One of the most natural-sounding well-researched plays I've ever read, pulling from Greek, McDonagh, Southern Gothic melodrama - it would be a hell of a thing to see. Make it happen!

This deft two-hander lulls you into a false sense of security - even though you may be familiar with the historical context, the one-room set and head-over-heels newlywed couple are at a remove from the world beyond. As politics and financial burdens slowly sneak in, we watch as the characters are transformed, scene by scene. By the end, they're both the same characters, but simultaneously unrecognizable. The star of the show here is the clearly well-researched dialogue, full of effective, specific language tweezer-selected to get audiences emotionally involved. This play is a challenging but necessary vehicle for two versatile actors.

Harrowing. Brilliant. This play somehow accomplishes the impossible: it almost sneakily draws us inside its world, so we both feel for these characters, while we follow them into a surprising yet inevitable nightmare of death and despair. The personal, the political, the present, the past, our hearts, our minds, are all tapped in this compelling page turner of a play. A tour de force for two actors. I hope to see it on a stage near me, soon. It should be done: everywhere.

A deeply unsettling play that burrows its way into your brain and plants roots. The eerie sense of remove serves to make the characters' treatment towards their slaves, along with the increasingly shocking (offstage) violence, even more disturbing. Their casually dehumanizing language, uttered as naturally as breath, is extremely well-crafted. An extremely effective experience that really sticks with you, even on the page.

This play is a chilling tour de force. Watching how seemingly rational, innocent young characters in the pre-Civil War South allow white supremacy to infect their mind and drive them mad is horrifying, but deftly explored with shrewd dialogue and fully-formed characters. The elements that are period-specific are well researched and excellently executed. Lewis creates a layered, dramatic piece that I couldn't stop reading.

A horror story spoken with a smile. Armed to the teeth with frank dialogue contrasted with horrifying brutality, The Gift is resonant and chilling.

Extraordinarily powerful and unsettling, Mildred Lewis manages to so sharply illustrate the ways that white supremacy, hatred, and bigotry births, foments, and overtakes in an eerily quiet and subtle two-hander. Susannah and Enoch are deftly rendered characters who are multi-dimensional. At the same time that Lewis shows them to be human, she just as acutely shows the roots of their hatred and dehumanization of black people. I was awed by how well this piece works as a small, specific story and as a microcosm of the toxic cycle of prejudice and oppression. The ending is chilling.