←Recommendations of Better

There's a muscularity and sinewiness to Gatton's writing. So much for each character to chew on in the scenes. A bleak but honest vision of capitalist America.

Such an incredible play. The characters explode of the page and the dialogue is like a locomotive at full speed. This play is full of surprises and I loved reading it.

I do love me a hellscape! Especially one immersed in heightened mundanity. And Gatton delivers! BETTER is a luridly fierce extrapolation and magnification of the tyranny of low-level success in middling power structures inherent in working class industry! The characters are relatable in ways that evoke both empathy and shame. He expertly shifts timelines and perspectives while giving us a central mystery with a masterful twist. A funhouse mirror reflection of our times. Beautiful and grotesque.

I saw a reading of this a week (two weeks?) ago, and I have not stopped thinking about it. Vince Gatton's level of talent is offensive. All four of these characters are fully-formed and messy and questionable like real people, yet they also each have moments to shine and arcs and when all four of them are put together it makes a play that says so much so simply, and how did he do it??? A perfect play for this moment, when so much seems to be coming together to resist change all around us.

Gatton's characters are trapped in a horrible place, both on the processing floor and middle management office of a meat-packing plant and across the nation. All four are trying to better themselves -- morally, socially, or financially -- with tragic results. And yet, there's a glimmer of hope at the end. Which I love.

A play loaded with characters so specific, from their stories to their speech patterns, that you can't help but fall in love with them even at their worst... and there is a LOT wrong in this sincere, endlessly absurd workplace horror...but so much more is right. Seeing yourself in this story (and you WILL - because never before has specificity felt so universal!) is devastating and illuminating all at once, but it means so much that at the end, I felt such a surge of hope. Timely. Incredible!

Gatton is a very good humanist playwright - this is important work! - and here he has honed/refined his sensibilities into a play that allows each character a moment of dignity, even amid their flaws and looming darkness. BETTER is delicious, poignant, compelling, hopeful despite an overwhelming amount of evidence, unnerving and unfortunately timely. You will love these characters even as they unsettle you; more importantly, you will understand them every step along the way.

When we're given no choice but to work in a fundamentally flawed system, we can either try to make it better... or burn it down. Vince Gatton's cleverly structured Orwellian drama is shocking, darkly funny, and unpredictable. Despite the tragic inevitability of the play's events, the message is one of resilience and humanity, even in the face of certain defeat. The play also doesn't lose sight of the humanity that is suppressed by the atrocities of the system. Compelling work!

What starts as a simple blue-collar drama takes a sharp turn for the Orwellian in Vince Gatton's Better. Gatton creates four unassuming, working-class characters and drops them into world where the price of self-preservation is complicity with a system that manufactures nonstop atrocities.

You can wring your hands and lament how you don't understand how the white working class in this country can think and act the way it does, or you can read Vince Gatton and let him make everything crystal clear. It's all here in BETTER - the resentment, the compromises, the complicity with a dangerous system because it's all you have - in hilarious and bloody style. Somebody produce this now, while it's still a play - before bird flu and other current realities turn it into a documentary.