←Recommendations of The Family Saves A Life

Premiere Stages, the professional Equity theatre company in residence at Kean University, is pleased to recognize The Family Saves a Life by jose sebastian alberdi as a Semi-Finalist for the 2024 Premiere Play Festival. The play rose through a competitive selection process conducted by Premiere staff and a panel of outside theatre professionals to become one of 48 Semi-Finalists out of 760 submissions. The panel was impressed by its distinct characters and loved the purposely sketchy details of the world of this play, keeping with the tunnel-vision through which the family experiences the world. Our congratulations and thanks to jose.

A horrific play about what makes someone "good." An amazing contemplation on the issues of abortion and climate change. Really want to see this play fully produced. This has potential for some really brilliant sound design.

If we're all doomed, we might as well have a play like this to take the edge off. This is a terrifying, beautiful play. It is a literal nightmare. I'm chilled to the bone. Sebastian is a formidable writer.

Wow. This play is a quick read but a slow burn of teeth-clenching metaphors that play with humanities love of prioritizing... all of the wrong things. The piece would bode so well for a very strong ensemble to help carry its intricate moments and heavy archetypes. The dialogue is so perfectly human and natural that the quiet spaces feel all the more sterile and terrifying. I would love to see this staged as a tech heavy tragedy and to leave the theatre with my jaw in my lap.

I loved thinking about this play as a Greek tragedy, but I also felt like there were many Brechtian notes. It is so intense and enraging to watch this story play out, that I get both a catharsis from this script and a drive to fix things.
This play resonates so much with everything happening in the news.

A captivating page-turner of a script. From the opening moments the play is filled with the dread of Things That Could Go Wrong, and the magic is in how when those things do go wrong they seem both surprising and inevitable. The dialogue draws you in, and creates characters that feel specific and real while also resonating into mythic representations.

This play beautifully explores dynamics between people with completely different viewpoints in a way that enlightens the reader to injustices that have only escalated since the time the play was written. Packed with multi-layered imagery and thought-provoking dialogue, this piece is an emotional page turner that will give the reader/designer/audience member/etc. much to ponder about long after it is over.

I loved the quiet and persistent escalation throughout and Miri's compelling journey in general. What a wonderful extended metaphor that the play built to a visual disaster onstage of both "Biblical" and climate change proportions--it hammered home the tensions within the play about faith, science, and religion. The interactions are spare yet revealing, straddling a well-drawn line between naturalism and heightened tragedy. Unsettling and a conversation-starter--I hope to see this piece developed and produced!

Wow. Spare and unsparing, this is an intense and fascinating family drama wrapped up in an apocalyptic fairy tale (which might be more real than any of us want to admit). The playwright has a wonderful gift for dialogue, and knows how to use it minimally to draw characters with maximum impact. Any actor worth their salt would gobble up every page, every moment, every letter of this thought-provoking play.

The Workshop Theater is pleased to recognize j. sebastián alberdi as a playwright selected out of a competitive pool of applicants for our Fall 2021 Writer’s Intensive. The Writer’s Intensive is an eight-week long, playwright-driven process geared towards revising an existing play. In The Family Saves a Life, j. sebastián offers a tragically human portrait of a pro-life family at the end of the world. This haunting meditation on religious extremism and ever-increasing climate disaster beguiles and frightens in equal measure, portending a future we may already recognize and an outcome we’re too late to prevent.