Recommended by Emmet L.F. Cameron

If you’ve ever wanted to meet your distant ancestors & have them try to sell you your present day malaise, this is the play for you!

I love the mix of realism twisting into fantastic horror in this play.

Although brief, this depiction of a trans girl & her family resists simplistic depictions of acceptance/rejection as a binary. People can be hurtful to those they love. People who have caused harm to their loved ones can take their pain seriously & seek to prevent further harm. The urge to protect can manifest simultaneously in immediate acceptance & in limiting expression. Transitions of all kinds are what theatre is about. None of these characters are the same at the end of this 10 minutes as they are at the beginning.

A carefully curated window into a part of art history I knew nothing about. I love the interplay between creating moments that will be recognizeable from the artwork itself & filling the space & time around those moments with life.

This play feels like sleepover pillow talk with your smartest, strangest friends. I didn’t know how much a play could feel like that.

Young & Old become very specific characters while they enter the play as representations of their respective generations to one another. I'm reminded of the Pansy Division song "Obstacle Course." The play may only last 10 minutes, but I'll be thinking about these two -- & all the lost loved ones they refer to -- for a long time.

I love a monologue with a clearly defined sense of place & time, & this one is so perfect. Amina builds a container to let out all her messy feelings & remove herself without a trace. But something tells me this *fucking man* is not going to forget her so easily.

This play has an openness that allows the actors & production team to BYO specificity -- which seems about right for such a universal & yet unknowable experience. The audio version on the Gather by the Ghostlight podcast does it excellently, & really shows off how poignantly these words bring us through Michael's experience with death, even in the absence of the play's visual elements. & yet there's so much more to explore in different possible stagings or recordings.

Listening to this play on the Theatrical Shenanigans podcast, & then doing a little google research to learn more about Ella Harper, I was impressed how much of Harper's scantly documented life was reflected in this short script. You can learn a lot about a person in 10 minutes, with the right writer at the helm.

The lecture being given by Auden is a powerful one in itself, made all the more so by the moments of private soliloquy woven through it. This emphasizes for the audience of the play how much Auden is unable to say directly to his audience at the 92nd St Y in 1954, even in the wake of such a tragedy as a great intellect & hero being pushed to suicide for his sexuality. This play happens in a very precise moment in the past, & it is very important right now.