←Recommendations of A ONE-ACT PLAY

A very real and honest clash between two relatives who honestly want to connect and be there for each other underneath it all. Funny and well done.

Life tends to be full of awful people and Asher Wyndham has put two incredibly awful people onstage in this gut-punch of a play. Great roles for two women that are unlike the typical ingenues and mother figures that fill most plays.

Wyndham paints a powerful portrait of two women with ferocious, desperate, mutual need who are tragically unable to connect. Both are drawn with painstaking specificity and could, with just a touch more self-awareness, be deliciously comic instead of devastatingly lost.

Wyndham's plays always hit me in the gut -- because they're -funny-, these characters are so true, are so -serious- about themselves... until, suddenly, it's not funny anymore. Because his characters are desperate, and desperate people make desperate choices. I love Evangeline. I love Jackie. What they do to one another in this short play hurts: because Wyndham has given us dignity, humor, and grace -- and then the characters, in their desperation, snatch grace away from each other. Deeply heartbreaking and beautiful.

Wyndham doesn't pull any punches in this honest look at a last-chance family who at once desperately need each other yet aren't really equipped to help each other. The characters both feel very real and their decisions, though regrettable, feel genuine.

Wyndham captures two versions of one thing here through two characters, one a common sight within a Wal-Mart, the other more upsettingly seen in a city park. This one-act pits two diametrically opposed understandings and search-missions for the concept of home, and although at times comical, it never feels patronizing towards its subjects. These characters are angry and on edge, but impressively not cartoons or caricatures. There's an underlying desperation, a sense of being lost, hence a searching or destination-seeking on both their parts.