←Recommendations of The Body

Selected for ATC's 2024-25 Salon Reading Series.
In Steve Mould’s spare and intimate play The Body, theater's purpose is reduced to the simplest and most humane form; two characters and a single relationship that exposes the human response to pain, grief, and loss while providing a path to understanding and healing. It is the simplest stories that are often the most profound. Highly Recommend for production. I saw the Phoenix production - powerful and intimate.

This play is so far up my alley it might as well be on the adjoining street! I love any play that can sustain a particular mood, especially one that seems to exist just outside the bounds of our accepted reality, and this play does that beautifully. It's a unique and deeply unsettling descent into the madness of grief.

A tightly written, unsettling theatrical exploration of grief and loss and how those things shut you off from and infect your relationships with others. The sparely written scenes are economic with their language but contain multitudes in their silences and specific word choices. The horror is palpable, psychologically taut, and builds slowly throughout to a few well-chosen grand gestures. The use of the doll is absolutely brilliant as well, and I'd love to see it manifested onstage. Abby's revisit of Joe in the future is haunting and a poignant punctuation to Joe's arc when he retreats inside himself.

And eerie exploration of the Dynamics between stepparents and stepchildren. Who hasn't wished for an easy way to connect, to forget the past, to move on. Steve Mould's gives his characters their wish we get to delight in their destruction.

Deliciously macabre. The Twilight Zone meets Edward Albee. The kind of play that would be fun to see with a group of friends, as the conversation afterwards would be undoubtedly provocative.