←Recommendations of Homesick

The community of national & local readers for the 45th Bay Area Playwrights Festival in 2022 enthusiastically recommends HOMESICK, or sacred heterosexual spaces as a Semi-Finalist at Playwrights Foundation. We were highly enjoyed the play's investigation of home, identity and queerness. We were compelled by this play's promise in its well-executed employment of expressionistic style and biting cultural satire. We hope this play is widely read, finds dedicated collaborators, and moves swiftly towards production. #BAPF2022

Like The Truman Show by way of David Lynch mashed through a satirical nightmare thresher in the backyard "homesick" invites you into the dangerous, dysfunctional, and dizzying living room of a family long overdue for a reckoning. The inventive and surreal stage direction and the grade A hyper reality tv dialogue (all of Heidi's monologues and Todd Too!!!) mixed with moments of heartbreaking poignancy met with ignorance are in abundance. Ruminations on queerness/internalized homophobia, unpacked familial/generational trauma, etc. fill every corner of the play like knickknacks collecting toxic dust on a mantelpiece. Highly recommend!

Premiere Stages, the professional Equity theatre in residence at Kean University, is pleased to recognize HOMESICK, OR SACRED HETEROSEXUAL SPACES by Ryan Drake as a Semi-Finalist for the 2022 Premiere Play Festival. HOMESICK, OR SACRED HETEROSEXUAL SPACES rose through a competitive selection process conducted by Premiere staff and a panel of outside theatre professionals to become one of 35 semifinalists out of 655 submissions. The panel was particularly impressed by the play’s balance between absurd comedy and heartfelt pathos in its commentary on contemporary gay identity. Our congratulations and thanks to Ryan.

Beneath the frenetic, satirical, fabulously referential exterior of this play (so many knives!) there’s a poignant meditation on expectations—society’s, our family’s, and our own—and what happens when you fail to meet them. In a script full of striking images, Todd and Todd Too’s fights (“You’re just one of those gay people who judges other gay people for things they would do if they could.”) and the final, quiet scene will stick with me the longest. I hope an ambitious group of artists brings this to life and I’m there to see it!

Razor sharp and genre-bending satire that incisively explores the alienating, out of body experience that can be navigating family--especially as one grapples with their own identity and the parts of it that one's family is or isn't willing to confront. There are some spectacular and theatrical images here, some absolutely hilarious and mind-bending moments of comedy, and a poignant coda that looks at how siblings who have felt pitted against one another might join forces to confront (and maybe change?) cycles of regret and shame and silence.