←Recommendations of Bereavement Leave

This dark, uncanny play should not be relatable.

I related SO HARD to this play.

Prillaman uses tons of subtle but effective theatrical devices to build the ambiance of your average American workplace. Fans of language and wordplay will have a field day hunting for clues to the nature of the work. I particularly appreciated the doubling in the piece, which was not for budgets or convenience but to show the extent to which everyone is replaceable. Oh, and did I mention it's freaking hilarious?

Put on your casual shirt and get reading! What must be done, must be done!

A masterfully creepy, darkly funny piece that manages to both satirize the world of soulless corporate entities and serve as an effective look at the existential terror that our entire lives could just boil down to some numbers on a screen somewhere. Prillaman creates such a fascinating world that seems to exist just slanted off of our own, giving us just enough information to keep us engaged, not revealing the full truth until the very end. Great stuff!

Darkly comic and thoroughly riveting, Bereavement Leave takes us into a creepily familiar dystopian workplace and buffets us with a heady mix of wit, horror and banality. I laughed, I gasped, but ultimately I admired and enjoyed this work unreservedly.

Prillaman has penned a play for our time, its relevancy sharpened with a Kafkaesque whetstone. The comedy is gut-busting, the tragedy is heart-wrenching. And so well rendered is the deceptive dehumanization employed by this caricatured-but-not-really corporation.

Now, as we all recognize and reckon with the exploitative practices of big business and the human cost of productivity, let this play be our anthem. Truly brilliant and worthy of our undivided attention.

If you have ever had an office job, the never-ending mundane tasks and grating bureaucracy of the BEREAVEMENT LEAVE workplace will feel all too familiar; the play brilliantly brings into sharp relief how very little separates life in the corporate world from an absurdist nightmare. It will make you reluctant to ever open your communal office fridge again--but in the most darkly hilarious (and extremely produceable!) way!

What a perfect play for our times! The world-building that Prillaman does is the key to trapping us into a story that never lets up (in the best of ways) and the strange sense of corporate-induced menace gets louder and louder as the play moves forward. I swear this is my partner's joblife for real and explains an awful lot! Sinister and wonderfully written!

Wow, this play is great. A supervisor who committed suicide is discovered on Monday, and the play follows his office mates as they try to slog through the week, processing the grief they feel from his suicide and from the work that they do. Although it deals with heavy topics, "Bereavement Leave" is a quick read with engaging dialogue and many truly funny moments. I especially loved how each character was so distinctly their own person, even though their names are just numbers. What a different, wonderful play!

Like The Office meets No Exit through a Dead Like Me/Pushing Daisies lens sapped of all whimsy and technicolor - Bereavement Leave is a play that not only shows how the monotony/bureaucracy of any job can literally and figuratively kill your soul but how its the small things - a joke, a simple "how are you", and breaking the rules - can mean the difference between a life lived and a life in living death. From the biting satirical dialogue, distinct characters, and a pace that is far from sluggish Prillaman's play needs to be staged ASAP!

I think office space plays are a still under-utilized settings, and the opening stage/sound directions alone had me eager to strap in for the ride deeper into the world of this place. The dialogue is brilliantly monotonous and repetitive in their word choices and it compliments the air of this environment perfectly. The dark and subtle wit mixed with the slight absurdisms in and of the characters creates a wonderful white-collar horror comedy that (whether having worked in an office, or having been lucky enough to avoid such hells) will connect with the working class audience of the masses.

So, so funny in one of my favorite kind of ways. Dark and subtle. I LOVE the floor manager. The other characters are utterly singular despite having numbers for names. A treat to read. Would love to see. Highly recommend.