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Jillian Blevins

Recommended by Jillian Blevins

  • Too Old by Erin Moughon
    29 Jul. 2023
    “ A perfectly terrifying horror short, TOO OLD capitalizes on an audiences expectations, setting us up for a stomach-dropping and satisfying twist that feels both inevitable and surprising. A killer addition to any Halloween play festival. ”
  • Kill Shelter by Ashley Rose Wellman
    27 Jul. 2023
    “ Ashley Rose Wellman’s KILL SHELTER manages to be both intimate and expansive—a fitting contradiction for a play that insists on nuance and moral ambiguity. Colleen and Ellie’s well-drawn mother-daughter relationship anchors a story that tackles generational curses, abortion rights, euthanasia, teen parenthood and poverty. The real miracle of the play is how naturally these heavy issues are woven into the narrative, and how light a touch Wellman manages to have with them.

    The heartbreaking puppet sequences are uniquely theatrical and unflinchingly humane. Uncertainty is at the heart of KILL SHELTER—and that’s it’s greatest strength. ”
  • Nihilist Walks into a Multinational Retail Corporation (or, The Walmart Play) by Anastasia West
    21 Jul. 2023
    “ THE WALMART PLAY is an absurdist comedy that confronts late stage capitalism and its attendant horrors (child labor, gun violence, a pervading sense of purposelessness) and gives them the finger (before shooting it off and setting it on fire). Anastasia West’s surreal, metatheatrical corporate hellscape is full of darkly hilarious one-liners, and comic callbacks that get funnier as the play goes on. West’s theatrical imagination is huge—directors and designers will be challenged and delighted to realize her twisted vision in all its flaming glory. ”
  • The Activist by Ricardo Soltero-Brown
    15 Jul. 2023
    “ “Two people can have the same goal and disagree about how to get it.” This sentiment, spoken by THE ACTIVIST’s ardently truthful protagonist, is a dangerous one to speak aloud. Olive’s constitutional inability to conform—her reluctance to couch her real feelings, curb her need for specificity and clarity, or deny her messy humanity—is her fatal flaw in what feels like the first “tragedy of manners” I’ve ever read.

    Soltero-Brown’s funhouse-mirror reflection of the left eating itself is written with dead-pan humor, searing intellect, and unflinching vulnerability. It’s a necessary play. ”
  • Stinky Girls by Kelsey Sullivan
    11 Jul. 2023
    “ Female body horror hits different. Our whole lives are body horror. Our bodies feel both alien and somehow all that matters about us. Our bodies don’t exist for *us*. We’re taught to hide our biology, our base humanity, our stinkiness… so of course, in private, we wallow in it.

    Kelsey Sullivan’s gross-out horror short makes excellent use of the sacred liminal space that all women know: the sleepover. (Her stage directions note that “there is no time”—she’s right.) Imaginative directors and designers will revel in the mayhem. ”
  • This Grass Kills People by Daniel Prillaman
    5 Jul. 2023
    “ If Ionesco were alive today, perhaps he’d have written THIS GRASS KILLS PEOPLE. Thankfully, Prillaman took up up the call.

    TGKP is a modern-day Cassandra fable in which “KEEP OFF THE GRASS” is a dire warning. Rife with uncertainly and ambiguity, it captures the self-recrimination of the pandemic age: to preserve life, we’ve stopped our own, subjected ourselves to alienation and abuse, watched other people experiencing the freedoms we long for and often felt isolated and lonely. And when consequences come knocking, we feel not vindicated, but as if we’ve failed to do enough. Devastating. ”
  • A Tragedy Of Owls by John Mabey
    2 Jul. 2023
    “ A TRAGEDY OF OWLS is masterful in its economy. In John Mabey’s imagining of a forgotten moment from history, not a single word is wasted; many of his spare lines ring with multiple meanings, speaking at once to the specific and the universal, the mundane and the transcendent. This level of craft can be easily overlooked. It doesn’t call attention to itself, and that subtly itself is evidence of the playwright’s artistry.

    It feels as if Mabey and his play are communing with history, answering his muse’s real life plea: “let it be known.” ”
  • The Good Word by Katy Laurance
    29 Jun. 2023
    “ THE GOOD WORD is somehow a play for the social-media age without once mentioning social media itself. Through its magical-realist premise, it explores the weight we place on our voices: on being heard, asserting our identities, and being an individual without saying the ‘wrong thing’. SHE’s biologically-imposed year of silence (called ‘Stillness’ in the play’s Black-Mirroresque world) is like the ultimate version of deleting your Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, with its attendant feelings of loss, invisibility, existential terror and ultimately, freedom.

    Katy Laurance is an expert at worldbuilding, crafting complex lore without over-explaining. A thought-provoking, original social satire. ”
  • LUMIN by Emma Gibson
    27 Jun. 2023
    “ LUMIN feels a little bit Midsommar, a little bit Cohen brothers, and little bit like your favorite investigative podcast. What strikes me most about this slow-burn thriller/family drama is its deep sense of place: Emma Gibson’s vision of Lumin, a cultish “sustainable community” in the Texan desert is so clear and unsettling, designers will thrill to bring it to life. Her original characters are just as well-drawn. Ma’s reserved, placid menace makes her a spectacularly original antagonist; determined, shattered Clancy, and fragile, delightfully odd Liv pop off the page too. ”
  • Generation by Nat Cassidy
    27 Jun. 2023
    “ Pregnancy always feels vaguely sci-fi. In GENERATION, Nat Cassidy takes that to a horrifying extreme. With purposeful ambiguity and a surgical level of restraint, this play allows an audience’s imagination to fill in the blanks, resulting in a terrifyingly effective moral parable—more deeply frightening and relevant in a post-Roe America. ”

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