←Recommendations of Dark Twist

An intimate yet sprawling memory play that is ripe with secrets. With every page turned there seems to be a new twist. Each once growing darker and darker than the one before. Rich and complicated characters are at the heart of this story and their quick witted dialogue keeps the blood rushing.

Williams blasts open old wounds sustained decades ago by prep school students who have returned to teach at the school they both attended. The result is a quick-footed, compelling drama that does not pull punches, but does hold secrets, including repressed memories that, when they surface, threaten the tenuous balance each character has worked for years to maintain. Highly recommended.

Goddamn, high school was a horrible experience for Richard and Jeff, and the memories are imbedded deep into their psyches. Williams not only touches on their lingering wounds, he digs at them, tearing open long hardened-over scabs with force. An exorcism of a sort, Williams displays a darker world view than usual in this work; whatever Richard and Jeff may have learned from confronting their memories, he leaves no doubt the cycle will continue, and it is vicious.

I loved the way Williams explored boarding school cultural here through many different lenses. He managed to examine both the positive and toxic elements of such communities in an even-handed manner. As someone who taught in a boarding school for a long time, I appreciated the nuanced look at the varied ways identity forms and is shaped in those environments, and the immediate and long term impacts of the traditional structures and systems that such places cultivate and perpetuate. Each character was multi-dimensional and interesting, and the potent story is told in a compact and elegant structure.

Many of Williams’s candid plays involve memory and reconciliation. DARK TWIST explores these themes through the eyes of two former prep school boys, now men, who outwardly reject the past while clinging to it emotionally. Rich in symbolism and subtext, the story unfolds through scenes involving calculated role playing that underscore how we are all playing one calculated role or another in our day to day lives. A penetrating and thought-provoking play.

PHILIP MIDDLETON WILLIAMS has written a compelling play. Two former students and friends return to the boarding school at which they were students twenty years later as teachers. Each has a past to tell and both find out more than they realized or understood about each other, themselves, and the boarding school. “Dark Twist” is a brand of tobacco smoke, but it is also a metaphor for the sameness, unchanging, traditional ways of the school, its faculty, and students. You can smell the aroma and remember it from days gone by. Tradition, habits, old desks - can they change? BRAVO!

This play packs a punch! Dark Twist refers to the pipe tobacco smoked by the dean of faculty at St. Edmund’s School, but more to the point, Philip Middleton Williams has given us a tale about the dark twisted experience of Jeff and Richard, two alumni returning to the schools after 20 years to teach. The tradition, the hazing, the agony of their high school experience – I felt it all as Jeff and Richard reconnected, shared their memories, and, in surprising fashion, confront the dean. Bravo!