←Recommendations of Monster (Or #MeToo, Brute)

YouTube sensation Monst3r and his team have given away hundreds of millions of dollars to charity on his channel and have made millions more while doing so. But just as it seems that nothing couldn’t challenge his online empire, the viral “philanthropist” gets exposed for behavior sordid enough to completely destroy his finely tuned reputation. Gibbs’ wry and prescient writing takes down everything from cancel culture to viral apology videos and leaves you laughing from beginning to end. A comedic tragedy of Shakespearean proportions for the influencer age.

Funny, moving, and timely, this show is sure to be a hit with screenagers and theatre-folk alike!

Constantly engaging, expertly paced, effective as hell, and funny to boot. I’m still reeling from this one!

Monster is an incredible new take on a classic story, exploring the complexities of influencers, their great potential for harm, and the effects they can have on their team if left to their own devices. Using the story structure of Julius Caesar, Marshall Logan Gibbs eloquently draws parallels between the old tragedy and modern tragedies happening in our hyper-technical world that rapidly disposes of humanness for the sake of clicks, likes, and follows in an unforgiving attention economy.

Every now and then, I'll finish a play and simply go, "Wow, wow, wow." Marshall Logan Gibbs play is a tour de force. The unending energy and ever-increasing stakes will keep you glued to the page and the stage until suddenly it's over. We have a habit of dehumanizing famous people by making them into either monsters or saints. A saint's sins must be forgotten. A monster's miracles, too. Such is a curse of history. But Gibbs makes clear: to make things better, we have to sit in the mess.

An insightful, devilishly clever, modern reimagining of Julius Caesar, set in the world of a powerful social media influencer and his crew. Shakespearean references aside, it stands on its own as a moving, gripping drama with funny, rapid-fire dialogue. This would be well worth a look by any teacher struggling to get their students to connect with true drama, and any theatre looking to engage a wider audience. It's a fantastic play.

Marshall Logan Gibbs has taken on a monster of a task: take one of Shakespeare's most-produced and quoted plays and turn it to 21st Century tale of hubris in a setting for those of us who don't live or die by social media influencers. Fast-paced, witty and well-crafted dialogue, and characters who really come alive make this one of the best pieces seen at the 2024 Valdez Theatre Conference. And for those of us who struggled with "Julius Caesar" in high school or grad school seminars, this brings it to life and hits the spot.

This was one of my favorite plays at the Valdez Theatre Conference this year. We recognize these characters and the social media landscape they (and we) inhabit all too well. MONSTER is a wonderful satire about where we live now, but it is in addition a tragedy inspired by Shakespeare. But the tragedy is not born only of Monster's hubris and misogyny as Gibbs shrewdly forces us to see our complicity without a heavy hand. Smart, finely hewn, very funny, and of course hair-raising.

I love when playwrights have the courage to adapt Shakespeare and put his work into a modern frame (like James Ijames' "Fat Ham" a few years ago). Like Ijames, Marshall Logan Gibbs has breathed new life into another one of Shakespeare's known tragedies. Gibbs' script brilliantly satirizes the people that have this 21st century desire of seeking fame at whatever cost, and what happens when they get their much-needed poetic justice.

A vivid, ferocious satire of the modern cybermedia landscape, Marshall Logan Gibbs' MONSTER also manages to find surprising and heartbreaking levels of depth where you might least expect it. Gibbs is able to balance grotesquerie with genuine heart, up-to-the-minute technological storytelling flourishes (which feel earned for once) with classic structural smarts. Terrific, and more than a little bit terrifying.