Recommended by John Minigan

  • If You Could Go Back...
    25 Aug. 2018
    I saw this gloriously funny piece in a recent festival of shorts. It's ingenious, with time-lines (and characters) looping back on themselves, continuous reversals, and hilariously sharp dialogue. There is virtuosity in the craft, a string of hilarious complications--and all effectively teasing out the absurdity of thinking we understand what we would do (and SHOULD do) when faced with th big moral choices. It's an outstanding, fast-paced play.
  • To Love and Be Loved in Return
    19 Aug. 2018
    "To Love and Be Loved in Return" is a beautifully constructed spiraling in toward the middle of an affair--but not the affair you think you are hearing about. It's a devastating, clear portrait of people who, in the midst of losing their sense of love, are finding one another and finding a truth that, maybe, will sustain them in through the lies they have been told. Lovely, surprising, carefully wrought work that gives us a final moment in which one of the characters feels exactly what we feel watching her.
  • Sunday Sauce
    14 Aug. 2018
    Sunday Sauce is delicious. The play captures the way comedy and tragedy can play off each other in times of grief, and the five characters--especially the three sisters of a(n un)certain age--are clearly, lovingly, and hilariously drawn. Like the opera in the background of this play, the stakes and drama are always high and the passions intense. At the same time, the characters are lovable and rich in their own right and in their connections to their culture and one another. A warm, true, funny, wonderful play.
  • Burst
    13 Aug. 2018
    Burst is relentless in the best possible way. The characters and dialogue grab you from the first minute, and it's clear from the start that it's heading to a moment that will bring together the moral and emotional issues of the play. When it happens and we get a full understanding of the "tactics" these characters employ, we're left with the gut-punch of not only a character's guilt, but our own complicity. Clear, compelling, important, and thoroughly engaging.
  • SAM KNOWS HOW TO USE THE COFFEE MAKER: A TYA MONOLOGUE
    8 Aug. 2018
    A clear and powerful piece. The circumstances of the monologue unfold in layers as Sam tries to figure out how to process grief and carry on with life for him/her and for the rest of the family. Builds with exquisite care, detail, and structure to an end that feels like it could be a beginning--and that maybe Sam is ready for that beginning. So much for an actor to work with here!
  • Tin Man
    8 Aug. 2018
    Tin Man feels real, and because of that, it's heart-breaking. At the side of injured high school football player Dean's hospital bed, Max and Dean begin with banter that gradually reveals pain that's more than physical, and that almost helps to create a connection between them that could get past the too-common male silence about sorrow, loss, relationships. The play paints a vivid, accurate, and painful picture of how "padded" teen boys are on and off the football field, how hard it is to achieve honest, vulnerable communication, and how male silence about emotion passes from generation to generation.
  • The Widow of Tom's Hill
    30 Jul. 2018
    This is a gorgeous, haunting play that grabs you from the first lines of dialogue and pulls you deeper, scene by scene, into its spell. By the time it's worked through its twists and horrors and brought its characters to a conclusion that feels inescapable, it's achieved a kind of mythic energy and language and risen to the level of the classic American folk-tales. Stunning, poetic language and a compellingly dangerous relationship between its two characters.
  • Morning After Grace
    11 Jul. 2018
    It was such a treat to read this script and then see the show on its feet at Shakespeare & Company. Carey Crim creates such sharp, wise, funny characters that you can't help but fall in love with them right away--and then she brings you deep into their lives, their loves, their griefs, their struggles to find hope, and ultimately their "grace." It's rare to get to know characters so well, inside and out! So much fun, and so richly crafted and deeply felt.
  • Repossessed
    12 Jun. 2018
    Like the best science fiction, Repossessed creates a world with an inner consistency and logic and with important things to say about our own—in this case about consciousness, memory, and how much we’re willing to sacrifice to get what we want.
    And the concerns of the characters (are experiences/emotional connections meaningful if they are “virtual”?) are compelling and frighteningly contemporary.
    The structure of the play is, even as a reader, mesmerizing, moving from scenes to interludes that gives us glimpses below the surface of the characters and back in a fascinating and compelling way. Stunning, rich work.

  • Down on the Pot Farm
    25 Feb. 2018
    This is a hilarious, constantly surprising, wish-it-could-really-happen romp through a world of millennials, aging hippies, an old prison friend of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, and Jeff Sessions himself. The one liners are sharp and strong, and the underlying premise is subversive and glorious.

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