←Recommendations of Monarchs

What a joy! Danielle Frimer blends a very realistic, loud, and funny Passover Seder with a magical journey with Peter Pan. Sounds impossible, no? Rather than the prophet Elijah arriving, Pan shows up to take first-born Perri on a journey of self acceptance. It is truly a magical, theatrical experience, and one that I would love to witness someday.

This play is beautiful! It turns from funny to heartfelt and back again on a dime and is wholly original. I would especially love to see it staged to see how the designers handle Tinkerbell and the butterflies. Gorgeous!

I had the honor of being cast in a reading of Monarchs at the Valdez Theatre Conference, and I am in as much awe of it now as I was then. Full of culturally specific humor and heartbreak, Monarchs deftly balances the experimental with the familiar, weaving an epic and intimate tale across time and space. You will laugh, you will cry, and you may feel an overwhelming need to call your parents. Kudos to Danielle Frimer for creating this powerful, transcendent play!

a terrific and tender play about growing up and coming out--I was moved and honored to encounter this play at the Sewanee Writers' Conference and i fell in love. the play weaves together seder ritual with the rites of adulthood and the privileges and pains of dreams lost and gained. request it, read it, program it... it's rich and wild and profound.

I had the pleasure of weeping through this play at the 2023 Valdez Theatre Conference, where Frimer's impressively complex and empathetic characters reach for each other with an earnest, touching glimmer of magic. A moving story of coming out, wanting to be loved, and trying to love others. I cannot recommend this play enough!

A great big boisterous epic, fusing a Jewish-American coming out story with Victorian melodrama - thanks to a Pan who's been holed up in Neverland reading Charles Dickens and Judith Butler - MONARCHS works wonderfully thanks to Frimer's immense heart and assured language. The language! She unleashes arias of anguished longing, turns family bickering into baroque fugues, and sprinkles just enough punning humor to serve as pixie dust - a gift for actors looking for a chance to pour out their souls.

A Seder play different from, all other Seder plays!

Frimer takes the trope of Bringing My Same Sex Partner Home to Meet the Family and not only turns it on its head but makes it take flight with a touch of fairy dust and a Dickensian journey through time and life.

What’s especially lovely is that unlike many family dramas, YOU WILL WANT TO EAT WITH THESE PEOPLE!!! Perri, her parents, and Pan are great roles, each with a beautiful complexity. The dialogue is filled with music and heart.

This is one Sedar you will not want to miss!

"In the particular contains the universal." --James Joyce. Frimer has accomplished that feat in spades in her deeply felt and beautifully rendered Monarchs. Each character feels both at once entirely unique and like someone I've met before. Magical realism and family drama co-exist to weave this lovely tale that left me laughing, crying, and really wanting to call my dad. Excellently done.

Danielle Frimer has performed a two-pronged miracle: 1.) authentically captured the rhythms and energy of Jewish families without a stereotype in sight, and 2.) written a coming out play that’s at once deeply, heart-rendingly relatable and wholly original.

The Moteks feel so real, their family rituals, mythologies and foibles evidencing both their dysfunction and fierce love for one another.

Frimer’s protagonist gives voice to primal, universal fears—loneliness, failure, rejection—that resonate with anyone with a heart. Her version of Peter Pan sparkles with punny ebullience and mischievous magic, inviting us to get unstuck—to remember being young—to fly.