←Recommendations of Overtime

The twist is so good, so unexpected, that you want to start over and hear it all again!

A creative and funny ten-minute play about the complications of keeping the little ones alive. "The gasps heard around the world" is one way to describe the ending to this piece. Hearing this play at the William Inge Festival was a ton of fun, and I commend Vogel for her witty dialogue and captivating ending.

This is a great example of a smart, tight, ten minute play, and it has a lot of heart to boot. I had the pleasure of seeing a reading at the 2024 Inge Festival, and it brought a breath of fresh air and a smile to everyone's faces after a long string of readings.

I got the opportunity to see this wonderful, powerful piece performed at the 2024 William Inge Festival. Vogel engages us, engages us in the lives of these caretakers and their children and subverts our expectations ans assumptions in wonderful ways. Highly recommended.

It’s my reading experience that park bench plays are very hard to write - something always goes badly (as in ponderous exposition), but OVERTIME by Wendy Vogel is a park bench play that goes wonderfully right. Most of the play is a somehow simultaneously uneasy and reassuring conversation between three women watching children play. They are reassuring in their careful motherly observing and uneasy because there’ s the sense that something terrible is about to happen. I love most that it reminds us of the love from our mothers that has gone into us. A fine play.

As an empty nester myself, I look back on those first years of motherhood with nostalgic emotion and the gratitude for no longer being there. Motherhood is hard work. WENDY VOGEL has captured the stress and messiness of keeping kids healthy, safe, and stimulated. LOVELY.

Motherhood being a full time job as never been given as such a prominent and emotionally touching message as Wendy has here. In addition to the message at its centre she has sprinkled this short play with wonderfully funny moments and an exchange about motherhood between three very real characters. It offers three fabulous roles to perform and a conversation that mothers in the audience will related to, what more could you want!

Oh, this was delightful! I was enjoying the play from the start, and so I did not see the ending coming. When it came, I was totally, pleasantly surprised. On the whole, Vogel packs a lot in here: some funny parts, some wistfulness, and some actual wisdom about raising children. Quite a task to get all that in a 10-minute, but Vogel succeeds! This would be wonderful for any 10-minute festival to have as part of their itinerary. Recommended!

This was so well-written. I love the twist, and the comparison between mothers and guardian angels leaves a sweet message about motherhood. The characters, even being strangers, seem to have a mutual understanding of each other that is so reflective of womanhood. The themes of the play are clear yet understated. Well done!

I certainly didn't see that wonderful twist coming. Wendy Vogel suckered me in to thinking this was going to be one type of interaction, one that we've all seen before, and upended my expectations in a way that delighted me to no end. I love this kind of misdirection (and I hesitate to tell you what that is. Experience it yourself) And I would love to see an audience react to this. Hopefully they will the same way I did. Fun and relatable to anyone who has a child, or heck, has BEEN a child.