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Ian Thal

Recommended by Ian Thal

  • WELCOME TO HELL! AN ORIENTATION by Bridget Grace Sheaff
    24 Jan. 2021
    “ Is Hell a region of concentric circles of poetic tortures as imagined by Dante or a sealed room shared with fellow misanthropes as imagined by Sartre? Whatever the geography, it's now administered by a corporate bureaucracy of banal lesser demons and minions offering stale baked goods and orientation packets! ”
  • The Devil Exclusive by Jeff Dunne
    24 Jan. 2021
    “ A smart dark theological comedy on the subject of free-will. Dunne's devil has applied game theory to the human temptation to favor instant gratification over the future in a cosmological struggle between good and evil. ”
  • Capriccio Radio by Larry Rinkel
    23 Jan. 2021
    “ The on-air hosts and management of a classical radio station struggle to keep it afloat in the face of a commercial market and a technology that no longer supports the music that they're passionate about -- but also with the seemingly opposing drives to preserve and curate the classics, push the art form in bold new directions and encourage new work, or to make it accessible to new audiences whose primarily listen to more popular genres. A fascinating dive into the world of art and commerce as both the technologies and and culture are changing. ”
  • Liberal Arts by Ken Kaissar
    23 Sep. 2020
    “ Equal parts satire and tragedy with complex characters. Neither the ethics nor theories of truth and justice, nor the institutions of the university are ever fully equipped to handle the messiness of the individual's desires or desire to be desired, irrational kinks, or atavistic fears and bigotries. At times horrific, hilarious, and heartbreaking. ”
  • GROWTH IN ISOLATION by Monica Cross
    1 Sep. 2020
    “ Cross does justice to both aspects of the magical realist genre with on one-hand a realistic portrayal of the challenges and and tragedies of maintaining love and desire in a long-term, long-distance relationship, and a magical, and potentially erotic, antidote to the body-horror that has gripped our collective imagination in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. ”
  • CYRANO ON THE MOON by Monica Cross
    1 Sep. 2020
    “ An engaging fantasia on the themes of love for what might have been: Whether the lovers who could never admit their passions, or story that could have ended differently. Monica Cross imagines a sequel in which Roxanne and her collaborators, Sisters Marthe and Claire, compose, revise, and redact different drafts of a sequel about Cyrano and Christian in the afterlife. ”
  • 10,000 Years by Lindsay Partain
    12 Jul. 2020
    “ Partain's language is the most striking thing about this short two-hander. Is it an accretion of metaphors and allegories for what appears to be an environmental collapse beyond the house where Jamie and Freddy live, the collapse of their relationship, the couple's secret argot, or a literal description of the strange world they've adapted to? The most exciting part is that one is left believing all things, from the quotidian to the most fantastical, are simultaneously true. ”
  • Death Valley by Jen Huszcza
    21 Jun. 2020
    “ An absurdist fable populated by such American archetypes as silver prospectors, Bronze Age superheroines, capitalists, trade unionists, scavengers, and endangered species, set against the unforgiving landscape of Death Valley. At once bawdy and magical, Huszcza has fun toying with the genre tropes of superheroics, westerns, and tall tales, but demonstrates respect for what it is about these stories that have enchanted audiences. Don't neglect to read the playwright's notes for staging! ”
  • Suffer a Witch by Donna Latham
    20 Jun. 2020
    “ Though Latham takes a few dramatic liberties with the historical record in this dramatization of Grace Sherwood's death, "Suffer a Witch" is nonetheless a powerful drama told in an atavistic language rich in bawdiness, blasphemy, and viscera, about how an oppressive regime fueled by misogyny and religious fanaticism will use even the random marks nature puts on one's body as a point of leverage. ”
  • Marianas Trench (Part One of The Second World Trilogy) by Scott Sickles
    6 Jun. 2020
    “ By telling a story of two families linked by the pen-pal correspondence between two eleven-year-old boys in an alternate timeline divided America, Scott Sickles provides a defamiliarizing lens from which to examine the tensions in our own society. Students of history and human rights will hear echoes from other tyrannical regimes. Sickles' characters are psychologically complex, from the adults attempting to raise children who can survive in a new cold war era to the tween protagonists dealing with the anxieties of a growing awareness of the larger world, and escaping into a shared world of words and imagination. ”

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