Recommended by Scott Sickles

Some people see shapes in clouds, others don’t. Some people envision the imaginary and ephemeral, others extrapolate from experience through the lens of desired objectives.
Some plays are simple and lovely, and this is one of them.

Once upon a time, someone I don't talk to anymore told me: "It must be so nice being Asian; you don't have to work hard for anything."

They have no fucking idea. (About a lot of things.)

In this searing monologue, Soucy captures the stark otherness being East Asian in America, and it's not just rooted in non-whiteness. We're taught to work harder than humanly possible but never let anyone see the struggle. That effort and its toll are not only achievement-oriented but by identity-bound as well. He explodes these dichotomies and then some through a painfully personal lens.

There's a majesty to elephants. Not just in their stature and form, but in their bearing as a species. They are creatures of instinct and emotion. They have senses of humor. They love music, sometimes even playing on human instruments.

So why wouldn't they dance?

Soucy pens a profound memoir of childhood, truth, and the sadness that comes in a vacuum of misunderstanding.

The best zoos are meant to be refuges. But as he explores in THEY CALL ME TONY, animals only understand so much: who they are, where they belong, and when they're not there.

Much like the nearby woods, the cafe hides a lot of history, a lot of secrets, and like at least one creature who lives in said woods... it has an agenda.

These agendas have a symbiosis but the less said about that the better. The less said about all of it, really. Best to let the play hold onto its history, to keep its secrets. You'll learn its agenda when you enter.

Same with the woods.

As ever, playwright Busser spelunks the human psyche finding hidden drawings on the walls of the human soul. This time, those souls are hiding in the nooks and crannies of the psychoexistential tundra of alpine Europe! A tilt-a-whirl of exploration into emotional dysregulation and intermittent explosive disorder, social masking of neurodivergence, atavistic impulses re: bullying, the chokehold of administrative bureacracy, societal expectation, and the desire for a good haunted wilderness, this play is a narratologist's never-ending petting zoo.

It's also fertile bedrock for terrible accents, great fake blood, and insane onstage quick-changes! And lederhosen! I beg you!

Kid...

There's more than one love story going on here. None of them are between the two men on stage. Which is not to say that love isn't happening on that stage. It is. Stealthily. Privately. Where it shouldn't.

I respect the danger of a play in which a white man seeks to be dominated by a Black man who, due to the nature of their arrangement, is servicing the white man BY dominating him.

Yet through this arrangement, a soul is vivisected, histories revealed, love and rage remembered and ever-resonant. It's a gripping scenario. One you won't want to leave.

“10 - 45 MINUTES”

Talk about an attention grabber.

One has to look at this in its component parts: the play, the lecture, and the discussion.

The discussion is poetic. “Allows for answers.” A world of unscripted discussion opens up! Necessary discussion with and between students AND teachers.

The lecture is instructional, informative, and powerful. It’s the engine of the piece repeatedly taking us though the play immersing the audience in a fictional scenario they experience as real.

The play… no heavyhanded afterschool special dialogue. Realistic characters in a tense minidrama that teaches as it grips.

Necessary theater.

I wasn’t sure where this was going to go. It‘s a simple conversation. An honest one. Neither interlocutor appears to be hiding anything. Yet the tension soars from the start and lingers after the final fade. My imagination got ahead of itself but I watch horror movies. This is a tale of suppression: of sexuality, of emotion, of history… of a life. The irony of the honesty is that the conversation is about constructing an eternal lie – the fabrication of a fabrication. The characterizations are subtle, there is no melodrama. A gently brutal examination of love and grief.

A right jolly Jesus we have here! Nice to see him keeping his spirits up as he makes One Last Reservation. I’ve never paid any attention to what was in the table before and I had to look and take notice which was fun. But the buoyant humor of the piece and Christ’s jaunty sense of humor while facing the inevitable makes this a joy. DaVinci gets his due as well with some good-natured ribbing. And the piece’s parting shot is potent and sweet like the end of a good meal should be.

At one point while reading this monologue aloud, I abruptly had to stop. The piece is like a great TedX talk, filled with insights and observations about being a writer during lockdown, and at the aforementioned point... I RELATED! And for a while I could not stop giggling because the memory was so vivid.

I won't tell you which line because I'm betting you'll all have your own.

Storm-Martin has created a vivid character. You get a sense of her life, her body of work, who she is. You want to read and speak her words! And you should!