←Recommendations of Home-Style Cooking at the Gateway Cafe

What a fun play this is! Fully realized with several recognizable and differentiated characters, it has great dialogue and an atmosphere of the small town cafe that is perfectly set up. Finally, there's a terrific twist that you won't see coming. This could work as a full-length play, too, as the characters are such that you want to spend more time with them. (That potting soil needs to make it to the cafe!)

I was lucky enough to be at the reading at the Valdez Theatre Conference. A charming, delightful piece, set in a world of believable characters with intriguing dynamics - and some fantastic secrets! This play is delicious, and I only hope that one day we get to see a full length version - you will want seconds at the Gateway Cafe!

Philip Middleton Williams dishes up a slice of small town life, with a twist of humor and wisdom. I could feast on the luscious details so astutely woven into the dialogue, as each character’s choice of words let me peak beneath the surface. Leave your assumptions aside and take a seat at the counter in this little gem of a play.

Philip Middleton Williams once again demonstrates that he has a gift for poetic naturalism and an ear for the way folks in small towns talk and live their lives. There’s community. There’s work that needs to be done. And there’s the agreeing as a group to “yes-and” each other’s stories to demonstrate a unified front in the face of a weasel of an authority figure. This play has a couple of truly unexpected turns which gives the place and the people who live, work, and eat there a textured richness that is both magic and believable.

This play puts a pin in the balloon of everyone's expectations of small-town life. I loved how Philip Middleton Williams creates such interesting characters with (possible spoiler) not one but two backstories. He says quite a bit here about some of the hot-button social issues of today as well as how politicians exploit them — but never in a preachy way. As delightful and satisfying as a slice of meatloaf.

Once again Phillip Middleton Williams pulls me into what I think a play is going to be about and then flips my perception on its head in a fantastic way. Producers, Directors, and Actors should seriously think about booking a table at Gateway Cafe soon, and do so more than once.

Far from chain eateries like the Hard Rock Cafe, in small-town USA there’s the Gateway Cafe - also without the acute accent over the ‘e’ like the more famous brand. But locals here can make pit stops for the unique Gateway Cafe’s satisfying meatloaf, real deal home cooking rather than a rock group. Like the first episode of a comedy drama series set for a Cheers-like run we meet an array of characters, including a prodigal son, ready to turn tables on an intruder playing politics with their own allusive script worthy of a heart-warming updated Preston Sturges.

Right about the time when I started thinking this play was going to be just another depiction of small-town life, it flipped on me and went in a direction I never saw coming! I was delighted! The characters are absolutely delightful, and the twist in plot employed by Philip Middleton Williams makes this short play more than satisfying! HOME-STYLE COOKING AT THE GATEWAY CAFE is as delicious as Celeste's lunch special! Eat up, and enjoy!

Philip Middleton Williams delights us once again with his imaginative, down-homey, twisty play, “Home-Style Cooking at the Gateway Cafe.” Love these characters and would love to have dinner with them tonight!

A play that subverts expectations. The twists and turns for every character is very entertaining, and serves as a reminder that not everything is as it seems. A lesson for us all to take.