←Recommendations of Occupied

It was a real privilege to grow up with these two young women. Kantor's voice is full of goodness, humor, and warmth blended with real pain, as she guides her characters through the inevitable tumble into experience and the corresponding loss of innocence...and yet, there's hope. I loved it. I appreciate the natural shifts in the young children's logic, the perspective of a kindergarten teacher, and the relative safety of the bathroom/toilet/stalls. A well-paced, timely piece. There is much to commend it. I want to see this on stage. Now.

I enjoyed reading this play because it touches on the great tragedies of recent American history through the eyes of two millennial women. The characters could be my adult daughters or young colleagues; people to whom I think I cannot relate. What the play does with wit and humor is reveal their point of view and how we could cope with disaster. They inform all of us, no matter what age we are, that life is scary, This play would be super easy to produce and its time is now.

From the first line you know you are watching something interesting here. The characters are given such distinctive voices as they grow older and that is a mechanism brilliantly used by the playwright. Through the piece Aly brilliantly balances the innocent voices of Jac and Amelia with the horrors that are going on around them. As an audience member you feel privileged to know how the events they are discussing will/have played out but there is a distictive pleasure in watching them debate and discuss it. Its a piece that opens your eyes! Read it! Perform it!

Wow, who knew a play about two life-long friends chatting in bathrooms from middle school to adulthood would make me feel so many things?? The snapshots of Amelia and Jac's lives and friendship all fall on or around big American events of the past twenty years, and they keep coming back to issues of safety: When will we be safe again? (We were safe before, right?) It's powerful and genius and there is so much wonderful humor balancing out the heaviness of the real-life events. I don't know how Aly Kantor wove it all together, but holy crap, produce this.

"Occupied" is the most brilliant play I've read this year. Conceptually brilliant, artistically brilliant, purposefully brilliant. " I think you know it’s love when it stops feeling like love and it just feels like life" might be the most important quote to understanding love that I've ever read. I want to give away so much of the story, but the only word that continues to come out is BRILLIANT. The relationship(s), the dialogue, and the poem. The poem that will sit with me for a long time. This play is incredible. I'd pay top dollar to see it live!

We at Dreamcatcher Rep did a reading of this play, and both our audiences and our actors thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It deftly handles a lot of current subjects in a highly personal way with a ton of humor. The relationship between the women feels real and authentic. Moves at a great pace and would be fun to produce!