←Recommendations of XOXOLOLA

This is a firecracker of a play that takes you to such unexpected and marvelously frightening places. I love stories that draw on classical texts without putting them on a pedestal, and Greene is a master interrogator. It's devastating how familiar the male characters in Lauren's world are, but that only makes the story so much more necessary.

Loved this play. What a killer ending!!!

this play is so good and weird and cool and "HEAR LOLA SPEAK!"

I know so many women and girls who have been driven to the brink by the policing of their bodies in the theatre and beyond - and the ways in which a failure to imagine women complexly has led to so much pain. This play captures all of that so brilliantly and succinctly in a quick-moving, emotionally fraught, and genuinely frightening horror play! I love the way it integrates technology as part of the storytelling, adding a crucial dimension that feels bracingly real (and that reversal hit SO HARD)! Read this fantastic, powerful play and HEAR LOLA SPEAK!

Sometimes, characters take a life of their own, beyond the work, probably beyond the thoughts of the author. Greene captures that feeling so well in this play, creating what feels like a whole new character out of the presence of one that's been on the page for hundreds of years. The ending is an absolute whirlwind, something you know is coming but when it hits it lands hard and relentless.

The human body is a beautiful thing, it tells stories, creates life and thrives in unbelievable situations.
However, Greene's XOXOLOLA reminds us that the human body is also attached to a person. A person with desires and fears known all too well by the audience.
I've been a fan of this work for months and was lucky enough to finally see it live.
I found myself in tears in the last scene.
This play should be bound in a collection of theatre for the modern age.

This play about the consumption of the female body delicately balances discovery and exploitation. The tonal shift is marked and magnificent. The characters are empathetic and complex. An incredible ending. I really enjoyed this work and look forward to reading more from this playwright!

For women, all horror is body horror.

Rachel Greene’s Lauren is haunted: by a culture seeking to sexualize and punish her body in equal measure, by past trauma that leaves her silenced, and (maybe) by a literal ghost.

Along with her patient, feminist boyfriend and supportive professor, Lauren deep-dives into Titus Andronicus—Shakespeare’s most unapologetically violent play—and finds herself inexorably drawn to the brutalized ingenue Lavinia. With equal parts intellect and viscera, XOXOLOLA confronts our enduring cultural obsession with the virgin/whore trope and the physical and psychological toll it exacts. A primal scream of female rage.

Not to do the injustice of holding my own tongue, you'd do well in looking after your own with Rachel Greene's XOXOLOLA. Greene's feminine horror play brings to the front the purveyance of the female body as a site for envisioning and enacting violence, with an ending that will have you worried about dropping your jaw.

Greene's specificity of character and usage of camgirl chat mechanics provide a powerful rebuttal to the interest in regarding the archetypes and realities of virgin and whore as diametrical opposites. Moreso showing the audience the failure wrought in embracing such a narrative.

This play is both heady and visceral...the best of both worlds. Such a uniquely executed, focused, and powerful exploration of so much: the commodification of women's bodies, old as time expectations about women and how those expectations manifest themselves today, the duality of sex work and the ways it both provides and can inhabit power and agency, the male fixation with the "virgin"/"whore" dichotomy, and so much more. The ending is particularly potent and poignant and the whole play provides the smartest insights into Titus Andronicus I've encountered!