←Recommendations of Big Time Toppers

Ay - YO!!! This play MOVES! Its 175 pages long and I read it in one sitting??? It's hilarious, painful, and suspenseful in a way only a Vermillion play can be — but this one's extra special due to 1. the circus aesthetic, 2. the very real and (likely) personal dilemma of an artist approaching their thirties, and 3. HARLOWWW. Patrick's written a lot of great flawed protagonists, but this slimey fucker tops them all. Endlessly loveable, hateable, and intoxicating, Harlow is a vortex of ambition -- something simultaneously gorgeous and hideous when morphed under capitalism... lemme audition for 'em?

Big Time Toppers is a non-stop emotional rollercoaster that NEEDS to be seen and heard. It's so incredibly relevant and heart-wrenching while also keeping you laughing the whole way through. Patrick beautifully blends magic and logic in this fast-paced dark farce.

This play is laugh-out-loud funny and head-in-hands horrifying (a perfect combo). Patrick proposes a hard-to-hear thesis - that the worlds of work and art are equally destructive and illogical - through a farce rich with layers and constant escalation. Can doing what you love sustain you? Perhaps, but it can destroy everything and everyone else. The system, of course, is always at fault, but we have choices for how we operate within it, and this glorious cast of characters shows a whole over-the-top spectrum of doom and hope.

Like a clown car stuffed to bursting, BIG TIME TOPPERS is so rich with thematic weight and well-rounded characters that one performance is hardly enough to untangle its complex morals about friendship, family, destiny, and success. It achieves an incredibly deft balance, remaining realistic about the impossibility of dedicating one's life to art, while letting audiences feel just enough of the potential freedom to keep them from writing it off as madness. A dangerous and rewarding challenge of a script – not unlike juggling knives.

Big Time Toppers is a beautiful, tragic, and downright silly play about the chaotic and destructive nature of following your dreams. Much like the featured hurricane, Vermillion swirls a powerful narrative that starts at 100mph and only escalates from there. You will laugh at, sympathize with, and see yourself in these clowns; their struggle is perfect for the stage. There is so much theatrical potential in this script, you'd be a total clown not to produce this show!