←Recommendations of The Wonderful Out There

A great deal of both pleasure and insight is gained from witnessing the dynamics between Daryl, Jennifer, Larry, Bethany, and Carly in Dave Osmundsen's 'The Wonderful Out There', a play about neurodivergent children growing into and grasping their surroundings, their relationship to their environment. It is about achieving communication in face of the looming failure of it. The play renders a paced but rhythmic naturalism that gently sidles its way into your heart, despite its mystery framework.

I don’t think I’ve read a play that has dredged up more emotion, elicited a harder sob out of me than The Wonderful Out There by Dave Osmundsen. It is a marvel, a heartbreaking tribute, a eulogy, a call to action. I saw myself most in Daryl, but I also saw so many loved ones, kids I went to school with, kids I taught, people I know and have known. This play will stay with me for a long time.

THE WONDERFUL OUT THERE is a hard hitting play beautifully executed with love and compassion. Dave Osmundsen gives us a story about a group of kids whose searching and longing is so powerful it transcends life and death. This piece highlights the abuse faced by many neurodivergent children.

This is a captivating story that will make for a heartfelt evening of theatre, but it is also a memorial and a call to action that deserves a spotlight center stage.

This play wrecked me. The theatrical imagery, the well-constructed mystery, the tenderly drawn adolescent characters—and most of all, the unflinching way it confronts the discrimination and cruelty faced by autistic/ND children.

Osmundsen’s parable resonates on a universal level—is the joy of life worth the potential, inevitable pain?—but his perspective as a neurodivergent playwright brings an extra layer of meaning and specificity to this devastatingly beautiful play.

I’m the parent of an autistic child; I read TWOT with him in my arms, shedding more than a few tears and promising to protect him. Powerful piece.

This play is tragic and heartbreaking and harrowing and hopeful. This play raises awareness of an all to frequent issue in the neurodivergent community, and gives voice to children whose voices were taken from them. Powerful, moving, and hopefully motivating to do better for neurotypical audiences.

Parts Cuckoo's nest, Peter Pan, and Sarte; The Wonderful Out There tends to its characters' unique needs and tendencies with utmost care in the face of unthinkable tragedy. We see these kids thrive in their respective elements as the story reveals the circumstances that threatens to dim what makes them shine. perhaps forever.
It's a decision they'll have to make for themselves.

This play is beautiful in a painful way. That said, it does not inspire despair but rather it challenges one to love deeper in ways both radical and necessary.

My favorite Dave Osmundsen play yet.

Harrowing and beautiful, this play is Osmundsen turning his characteristic compassion towards unthinkable darkness and trying to find a light, any light, within it. The result is haunting and profound. Won't be forgetting this one any time soon.

There’s a moment a little over halfway in “The Wonderful Out There” that serves as the perfect display to this play’s crushing brilliance. A small moment in comparison to the play’s larger ones, a character forgets the name of his dog. I won’t say why or how it happens, but it has stuck with me since first seeing those words and I don’t see it leaving me anytime soon.

The same can be said for this entire play- it redefines and reimagines what theater is all while being harrowing, genius, heartfelt, and, simply put, incredible.

Beware of gingerbread houses.

This group home is like an inverted gingerbread house: perfect inside but getting out requires an honesty both unflinching and unfair. Especially to discarded children who’ve been through enough.

Bravely uncompromising, the play avoids being twee by showing its children at their most delightful and most taxing. We enjoy them AND get why their parents couldn’t hack it. Their caretaker Larry loves them as they are but his emotional paralysis - an agonized generosity and infinite despair – is heartbreaking.

This play enchants, soars, and devastates, in turns and ultimately all at once.