←Recommendations of Art Gets What it Wants

Better than any other play about process, ART GETS WHAT IT WANTS takes the time to examine the ways that collaboration can both affirm and drain the parts of the whole. You learn to love Glen and Julie and also want to dunk their heads in the toilet. And when the play reveals its surprises, you will be shocked and delighted. Sean’s voice is so vivid, equal parts satirical and deeply invested in why people act like the animals that they are.

This is cluttered with the mess of the emotions and, yes, conflict that spill out and fill the entirety of this shared space we call theatre. Despite the many layers of reality Swenson so excellently pulls us through, the friendship at the core of this story feels so natural to follow. Sharp, clever, and layered with chaos.

"Well, you’re boring. You’re boring! You’re not curious. And you’re not the Velvet Underground okay, there is nothing bohemian or radical about living here anymore, this whole place has been paved over into Disney for people like us, because our parents can afford it."

A great meta-play that never gets lost up in the cleverness of being meta. Deals with relationships between young people in a very real way. Really gets how we relate to eachother and art.

Art certainly does get what it wants in this sharp, twisting commentary on art-making, relationships, and how the two so messily intersect. Swenson conjures a kaleidoscopic hall of mirrors where the reader/viewer has to simply take the tragic journey along with these flawed protagonists, hoping this time they get it right. A clever, unique, pointed new take on old questions - I can't wait to one day see this play fully staged!

A real rollercoaster read. Honest, devastating, and very funny.
I think my favorite part was how it feels both deeply authentic and highly meta at the same time, that was such a cool balance to strike.

A sensitive, sharp play with some of the best one-liners I've read in a long time.

"Art Gets What it Wants" blurs lines — between art and artist, between friend and lover, between past and present, and between what we intend and how it's interpreted. You have to be pretty sick in the head to trust yourself enough to make something, so how fragile is that trust when you make something with someone else? Is it inherently romantic to collaborate?

More plays about art-making should be this interested in "why" and not "how."

Swenson gives a very intriguing and thought-provoking take on the theory of multiple universes through “Something Normal.” The dialogue was colloquial yet rich and captivated me until the very end. There are endless possibilities for its staging and I would love to see it in a hybrid digital/in-person format, utilizing technology.