Recommended by Heidi Kraay

I want to see this play over and over again, for all the reasons in previous recommendations, and because witnessing a 2020 Seven Devils Zoom reading felt like such a perfectly fitting, disembodied experience, the story, images and characters have haunted me ever since. Now I yearn to see the fully embodied version. Mystical, transporting, eviscerating -- ultimately a celebration of life and love, despite, throughout and BECAUSE of any/all/most kinds of sickness (and all their accompanying struggles), so that the play becomes strangely uplifting rather than depressing, connecting rather than isolating, thanks to intensive empathy. Beautiful beautiful beautiful.

This play is a spiritual, sexual, environmental and intergenerational awakening. The world needs this play in order to find healing. I hope it gets done everywhere so we can all grow from this enormous and visceral (yet grounded and genuinely funny and uplifting) experience that Esquivel creates.

In the audience for this play, I felt the way I do at most meetings--something ridiculous is happening, I'm on the outside (AND inside), surreality is reaching a breaking point and I don't think the people who called the meeting even know why we're here. And (I think) those feelings are completely as Reich intends. Yes, meetings have gotten out of hand. This play too gets out of hand--in a riotous, delicious, laugh-from-the-gut way that helps me reconsider what in heck we're doing together when another meeting gets called...and what I might do differently--laugh, for instance.

In addition to previous comments, I love this play's overwhelming, intricate and powerful use of language. The potential for no available translations for the audience in a multilingual play, as is the playwright's preferred production method, creates the possibility to feel like a stranger in a strange land across multiple dimensions. As Lam states in his notes about translated text, "Being uncomfortable by people in power speaking a language you don't understand is part of the point." Last Ship thereby reconstructs the way we even perceive hierarchy, allowing most audiences to feel as upside-down as the characters we first meet.

This play will break your heart and ask you to do the deep work you've always needed in order to heal the wounds you've been ignoring too long. This story and characters will conjure up a longing, howling ache you didn't know you need to unearth. Breathe deep as you read, considering with a nurturing glance the lost parts of you, of a friend you love (and may have lost). Many of us will relate and feel called to walk through the (amazingly funny) pain Jones asks us to visit, for our own sake. A brave, hungry, hurtling journey.