←Recommendations of LUMIN

As perfectly paced a thriller as you can find, LUMIN is a tense and rich play about taking "what's best for the community" to its logical extreme. To Gibson's immense credit, what seems like a straightforward moral divide muddies brilliantly as it goes, and by the final scenes the ending feels both earned and wholly unexpected. Deserving of a production yesterday.

The community of National Committee readers for the 46th Bay Area Playwrights Festival advanced LUMIN as a Semi-Finalist at Playwrights Foundation. We were intigued how the play hits an artery of what society fears right now, written in a form of a true crime form that audiences have a strong appetite for. The play is clear and well-paced as it draws the reporter into the world of Lumin, and has the potential to dig into timely questions. We hope this play is considered for further development and investigation, and finds dedicated collaborators in this play’s journey towards production. #BAPF46

Loved this thrilling play about the lengths people will go to keep their community together.

I watched a reading of LUMIN as part of the 2023 Valdez Theater Conference, and I continue to be so impressed by Emma Gibson's writing. This play took me on many emotional journeys, while also (appropriately, horrifyingly) fogging my mind, while also expressing profound, complicated beauty. Gibson's storytelling here smartly plays with time, revealing details that shift perceptions, also bringing urgency and danger to moments that are frightening. The play - with its sounds and visuals - is both theatrical and stifling, placing us in the impossible, heartbreaking, dizzying situations these characters find themselves in. Excellent, challenging, impressive work.

There may be topical echoes of modern-day cults, but at its heart LUMIN is a tragic mystery in the grand American gothic tradition, and a damn good one. It has a wonderfully disturbing insight at its core: in our ever more hectic and disconnected world, communities like Lumin, and leaders like Ma (a terrifically sympathetic villain) seem all too right and reasonable - until the moment their beliefs bring down tragedy on all around them. Marvelously well crafted, and oh so satisfyingly sinister.

That opening. I was invested from the start. The play is eerie and dark and funny and claustrophobic. The more Julian feels trapped, the more we do as well. Liv is the character who drew me in hardest. A child raised in a cult who has never left the compound. Who is she, who will she grow up to be? You feel like everyone is fighting for their own and every other character's souls. Huge stakes and plenty of reveals.

LUMIN feels a little bit Midsommar, a little bit Cohen brothers, and little bit like your favorite investigative podcast. What strikes me most about this slow-burn thriller/family drama is its deep sense of place: Emma Gibson’s vision of Lumin, a cultish “sustainable community” in the Texan desert is so clear and unsettling, designers will thrill to bring it to life. Her original characters are just as well-drawn. Ma’s reserved, placid menace makes her a spectacularly original antagonist; determined, shattered Clancy, and fragile, delightfully odd Liv pop off the page too.

This tense and well-crafted play builds relentlessly yet without the tropes of the trapped-in-a-box story. As the twists and turns reveal more and more horror without overplaying their hand, and while you hope that the outcome will be relief and release, there is still the sense that these characters and their battle is not over. When I saw the reading at the 2023 Valdez Theatre Conference, I was reminded of the stage version of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and Emma Gibson has given us a version that will stay with you.

This slow-burn thriller encompasses grief, loss, and cults. At its core, however, it’s about three parents—one grieving the loss of their child, one trying to reunite with their child, and another trying to keep her family together—grappling with their roles in their children’s lives. Gibson treats her characters with grace and empathy, even while they do horrific things to each other. The pacing of the story is deliberate, the revelations shocking the audience without overwhelming them, building to a high-stakes climax and a revelation more sinister than imaginable.

This play hits a number of buttons for me: odd, menacing, strange, dark, and still more than a little funny. The creeping dread that builds throughout is wonderful and it fits in directly to the times we find ourselves in, when blind adherence to faith or ideology or a leader can take us down dimly-lit paths which often end in ruin. This is in the great tradition of Shirley Jackson. Highly recommend.