←Recommendations of CHANGELING

Monica Cross has sewn together a familiar feeling fairy tale world with a deep and resonant familial woe. This play provides a wonderful metaphor that stretches itself over so many different parent/child dynamics. There is a moment when you look at your grown child and realize that time simply slipped away, like it was stolen, and you furiously try to get the child you remember back. This play evokes that feeling in me.

A beautiful fable about one of the great challenges and mysteries of motherhood: we conjure a child into being, and then watch as they become someone separate from us, and different than we ever imagined. In Cross’ fairy-tale, her characters are both totemic and deeply human, evoking the tenderness and tension of the mother-child relationship with spare and impactful poetry. Depicting the messiness and contradictions of motherhood is dangerous and risky ground: Changeling ventures there fearlessly and begs you to go with it.

CROSS does a fantastic job here creating a world that seems to POP right out a storybook — perhaps maybe ‘Sleeping Beauty’ or something. Perfect for young actors and audiences. I could definitely see a young drama performing this production soon! Bravo!

Why do we have children? For their sake? Or our own? Cross' beautiful, lyrical play is an astonishing short fable that probes into familial love, rejection, and what happens when our children turn out to be their own people. The language is delicate and cool like the sheen of the moon, but as dense as the forest. The central struggle of LostMother to accept this unexpected child is treated tenderly and can be played any number of ways (although the loud vitriol against our LGBTQ+ community comes to mind at the forefront). Highly recommend. I should go call my mom.

A soft and charming play that tucks thoughts on parental expectations and children's need to self actualize inside the haunting myth of changlings and beautiful verse. The heightened language in Cross's piece is effortlessly accessible because of the well crafted metaphors and practiced choices between simplicity and artistry.

This is an absolutely stunning verse play. Beautiful and numinous. The language and imagery are rich. And the gut-punch of mother and child trying to accept each other as they are, and not as they imagined, is universal and wrought with nuance and grace. HIGHLY recommended.

(Also, although 17 pages, the verse lines are short enough that it probably runs closer to 12 minutes.)

Lovely, rich, and lyrical. This timeless fairy tale has beautiful, visual dialogue and weaves a story of love and hope and loss. A magical piece for both actors and audience. Beautiful, beautiful work.

This is such an unexpected one-act play. First, Monica Cross uses folk tale/fantasy to explore emotions that feel very contemporary: disappointment, denial, family tensions about acceptance.

Second, Cross's language and use of verse makes those contemporary crises feel eternal and ever-present. It's very exact language -- follow the line breaks! -- and it seems very storybook-like.

It's a strange tension: contemporary, yet not, old-time, yet not. All of that added to a touching parent-child conflict.

This play is full of rich and gorgeous language and the characters' conflict, while supernatural in origin, could not be more grounded in the reality of mothers and their children. So many amazing moments throughout, and it's a sound & lighting designer's playground! Cross deftly weaves lyrical verse with human emotion and the result is simply magical. I love this play!

Generally, when fairies steal your baby, you don’t get it back. You get some crotchety agent of chaos replacing your adorable agent of chaos. But Cross’s LostMother is getting a one-time exception!

If only she’d read the fine print.

Cross’s easy-to-speak verse flawlessly combines old-timey formality with an earthy wit, as characters negotiate between maternal expectation and grounded magical reality. Children grow up faster when parents aren’t looking. They won’t want what you want for them, regardless. The circumstances and backstory keep you guessing. The result is heartfelt, suspenseful, and utterly enchanting!