←Recommendations of The Basement of Greatest Happiness

This short play is at once modern and nostalgic, hard hitting and gentle. It strips everything aside but what is essential and precious about life on this planet. Bravo, playwright.

I admire so much the quiet way Mathew Green achieves a zen-like thematic effect in THE BASEMENT OF GREATEST HAPPINESS. He suggests that our greatest happiness is not so much a hyperbolic state, but something more akin to gratitude for the lives we've been given and have lived. It's hard to imagine a play that gives more cause for us to feel affection for ourselves, the human race, as exemplified by Thomas, Julia, and Olivia. A remarkable achievement of dignity under extreme duress. [7-17-26]

Mathew Green achieves a small miracle here, managing to wring humanity and the last vestiges of hope from the direst of scenarios. This playwright's magic is found in the details, the way the simplest, sometimes unexpected memories supply the essential components for understanding why we live, even when we're about to die. This play is riveting - dramatically and emotionally - and will hold a breathless audience in the palm of its hand.

When the end of the world comes how do you want to face your doom? Doom scrolling, perhaps? As the elderly couple and their younger care-provider ride our their remaining time after a global nuclear attack in the basement of their home; they/we are are left to ponder not only our own mortality, but also the mortality of the planet and the mark we may or may not have left upon it. Alternatingly and sweet, the end of this darkly comedic play seems a fitting eulogy to a world we all to often appear close to becoming.

Oh wow, I don't want this to happen! When reading this play, I was right there in the moment with these three people. Wanting to hold them. Tell them something...anything...for their last minutes. This is one powerful one-act play. Wow!