John Kuntz

Necessary Monsters is (at least) five different over-lapping stories, all called “Necessary Monsters”. In the first scene you meet two people on a blind date, and discover that one of them is a film editor, working on a low-budget horror film called Necessary Monsters. In the next scene, you meet two people in a club, and you realize that they are characters from the film mentioned in the first scene. All the stories live inside each other like a set of Russian dolls. As the play progresses, the stories begin to overlap and entwine. The characters are all connected by one huge tragic event, and the play moves relentlessly towards that final moment.

"There are elements in Kuntz's strange, piquant tale — in which a soupçon of autobiography is ballooned by imagination and then wrapped in a mix of 1970s television, '80s rock, and the occasional Bach cello suite — of the Jon Benét Ramsey murder case, the Kim Edwards novel "The Memory Keeper's Daughter", and the formative experiences of a gay man haunted by memories at once sensual and bruising. At one point, Quint spots the heavy-breathing memory man who keeps calling his cell phone afloat in the sky and appeases the specter by donning a panda suit and serving up a committed, mechanically gyrating dance that takes him into the audience and back. But mostly this wounded soul tells his story from the bleak, blinking confines of his father's hospital room, where he tries to connect with a man beyond connection.

For all its ramblings down a memory lane strewn with also-ran candy, sugary cereals, and encomia to celery and "The Love Boat", The Salt Girl is the creepiest and most potent thing Kuntz has written since the chilling two-hander "Sing Me to Sleep". And in a raw, brave performance in which he sheds most of his zany mannerisms (not to mention his clothes), the actor makes us weep for his peculiar train wreck of a character, serving up painful history and recipes for Waldorf salad, even as we laugh at him."
- Carolyn Clay, The Boston Phoenix

“An intricate connective tissue of danger, desire, and loneliness stretched across the opulent hostelry of the title, [The Hotel Nepenthe divides] 16 characters among four actors…The La ronde–like work provocatively establishes many dots, letting the lines among them merely flicker. Among the threads in Kuntz's skein: a traveler who sets out to rescue his suicidal lover but ends up having a strange adventure in a taxi; a starlet regaling her paramour with a vivid tale about walking a red carpet through time so that the paparazzi could snap eminences ranging from Jesus to Harriet Tubman; a purple-clad young woman cradling an infant who breaks her nocturnal wanderings to chat with a garrulous cab dispatcher; a political wife who has slipped her powerful husband a mickey before trolling the streets in search of a whore to compromise him; a transvestite fairy; and several car crashes, the sound effects of which go on forever. Parallel universes and time travels are suggested as ways to account for how the random decisions we make can change the course of events.” - Carolyn Clay, The Boston Phoenix