How Can I Review Sam's Play?

I can't pretend to be impartial, after all, the author is my son, the director is one of his best friends, and the actors and actress classmates from NYU. The cast and crew are great people with tremendous chemistry who are tremendous fun to spend time around. If you're looking for a deeply cynical, hypercritical takedown of the Higher Power, you should probably try looking elsewhere.

But enough of attacking my own credibility. The play is intense, awful, gripping, and raw. See it.

The play opens with a limping ex-girlfriend (Larke Schuldberg) reentering the life of a smalltime drug dealer (Chris Littler) and his younger brother (Colin Hunt), who is working at Blockbuster following an unsuccessful attempt to gain admission to law school. She brings a bag of drugs, a business proposition, and a searing emotional pain that shows through in her limp. She's sexy (am I allowed to say that about one of my son's classmates?) and manipulative. Is she tender, or is she canny and tough through and through?

The older brother's cynicism and suspicion seem unjustified, as we want to believe in the redemption of the apparently fragile young woman, and the budding relationship between her and the goofy and similarly fragile younger brother. Ultimately, though, the vulnerability is found in the older brother, and ambiguity surrounds everything but the fact that the older brother has trusted too much.

The play has humor, fresh, original music, a functional and imaginative set, and a furious pace. The director, Chris Plante, has done a great job of bringing Sam's script to vivid life.

Watching this play was intense. It's not a happy-go-lucky play - it is gritty and disturbing. But I cannot imagine that anyone who sees it will not find it powerful, and thought-provoking. It's good art, and not just because it was written by my son.