←Recommendations of An Audience of One

There's the skill of showing more by saying less and then there's the ART that this short piece climbs to. Each line of dialogue is a short punch and the reader/viewer fills in all the painful, awkward gaps to a beautiful and full story. Very lovely play.

A desperate hero seeks respite from the monotonous routine of everyday life. A single climactic monologue, departing from the deliberately sparse and minimalist dialogue, breaks the repetitive cycle and expresses the core message of the play. Tragically, yet humorously, this message remains unheard. Michael C. O’Day has created a truly exquisite piece of theatre.

What starts out as a fast-paced "slice of life" piece ultimately reveals itself to be a highly insightful short play on our human need for meaningful contact. The unusual form gets your attention, and then the Hero's eventual eruption grabs you by the lapels. This is master class in short play construct. This was one of my favorite plays at the '24 Valdez Theatre Conference.

I saw this read at the Valdez Theatre Conference and greatly enjoyed it. It's clever central conceit makes for a briskly-staged play that accentuates the banality of everyday conversation and the superficial nature of our daily interactions, a trope which is rammed home in the play's sole pointed monologue. An experiment in form with a worthwhile payoff.

As I read "An Audience of One", I felt the threnody of pain and isolation embodied in this work by each of the characters, who carry multitudes despite the brevity of their execution. The "outburst" from the Hero is a showstopper and a cry from a soul perpetually lost in an urban wilderness. Nicely done!

Seen at the Valdez Theatre Conference. This powerful short play reminds us that each stranger we meet on the street has their own complex, deep, personal lives and minds that are all too easy to ignore in our brief mundane encounters and transactions. We are more. This play is not just clever wordplay, no, Michael allows us to re-examine how we treat each other. It's profoundly human, extremely effective.

A challenging yet wholly satisfying story with thoughtful, heightened use of language. "An Audience of One" needs to be produced far and wide; audiences will be moved and will remember it a long time.

AN AUDIENCE OF ONE by Michael C. O’Day is a brisk and entertaining short play with 5 allegorical characters. The action is very cleverly strung along with one-word utterances that parody the kind of social interplay our lives have been reduced to, in this, our capitalist world of brief transactional encounters. By the end we feel Hero’s frustration, but - alas - the golden age of the hero has been superseded by the consumer. A cool play for our times, especially with Vendor as the nexus of the manic activity.

The self-imposed rule of this short play starts out feeling like a gimmick, but quickly becomes a metaphor for our inability to connect with our fellow human beings on anything more than a superficial level, and the piece transcends being more than a writing exercise. It's 14 pages, but with almost every line being limited to one word, you have no excuse not to read it. So, stop reading this and start reading An Audience of One, by Michael C. O'Day!

Pulling off this rigorous a style exercise would be a feat on its own -- the strict minimalism of the dialogue, the fine-tuned timing of the physical bits, the precision of the repetition and variations -- but to also have the form so perfectly reflect the emotional terrain of its main character makes it a triumph. The coup de théâtre Michael O'Day pulls off is a joy to witness, and the feelings it evokes run the gamut. Sweet, funny, sad, and extremely satisfying.