←Recommendations of The Magnolia Ballet

a gorgeous southern gothic fantasia--the production of this at About Face in Chicago was lovely, and I hope it gets produced more widely!

The Magnolia Ballet was selected for the 2021-22 Salon Reading Series by the Angels Theatre Company.

It’s been a long time since a play has captivated my imagination quite the way Terry Guest’s The Magnolia Ballet has–it sticks with me. It’s not the story per se, but the storytelling; the way the story unfolds and reveals itself–the poetry, symbolism, and the …anagnorisis. The Magnolia Ballet is a rare achievement. Highly recommended.

Stunning! The lists and links and beautiful steps Guest's writing takes you through come together like a song. This play needs to be done many times and I hope to see it.

I feel like this is the kind of piece people refer to when they talk about theatre as a religious experience. It's the kind of play that needs to be performed around fires for years to come. The poetry and choreography is heightened but does not take us out of the real urgency of what Z is going through. The way Guest handles both racism and homophobia is stunning. This play leaves us with the question: What do we take and what do we leave from our pasts? I'll be thinking about this play for a long time.

An exquisite piece that balances the feel of a heightened, theatrical fable with a gorgeous naturalism in the characters' interactions. Guest both tells a compelling story of these specific humans while also making larger and significant points about masculinity and queer Black male identity and its relationship to whiteness and to a society that worships and idolizes certain aesthetic and desirability norms. Z's lyrical, complex monologue towards the end of the piece so poignantly deconstructs the fear, desire, shame, self-effacement, and anger of being a queer man of color defining himself in relation to whiteness. Haunting, theatrical, hopeful.