←Recommendations of wyrd

Premiere Stages, the professional Equity theatre in residence at Kean University, is pleased to recognize WYRD by Matt Minnicino as a Semi-Finalist for the 2022 Premiere Play Festival. WYRD rose through a competitive selection process conducted by Premiere staff and a panel of outside theatre professionals to become one of 35 semifinalists out of 655 submissions. The panel was particularly impressed by the immoral v. ephemeral questions posed about what it means to have a legacy and “do good” and the framing of power. Our congratulations and thanks to Matt.

I was in a writers group with Matt as he wrote this play and the way he evokes feeling through detail is stupendous. His characters are both of this world and entirely of a different one in which terrible things still happen but they are described so beautifully, you are convinced they are the true bread of life. As with all Matt's play, this is specific yet grand, granular yet worldly. Do yourself a favor and read it (and produce it!).

A stunning, startling, genre-bending piece that explores power, agency, connection/intimacy, and their intersection with gender and sexuality. This piece is absolutely hilarious at times. It's also beautiful and lyrical and includes some of the most compelling stage images I've been able to envision in a while and some of the most spare yet profound language I've read as well. The destabilizing force that is Jan really propels this piece forward in a fantastic way, and her probing of the sisters' life purpose and agency is moving and thought-provoking. I'd love to see it staged!

A beautiful meditation on the magic of the world in all it's power, beauty and love. Well done!

Every time I read one of Matt Minnicino's plays, I cry. Not because they're sad, though some of them can be, but because Matt's plays cause my heart to burst with joy over the career we've all chosen to pursue. WYRD is a beautiful, poetic, and absolutely heartbreaking play. Matt's writing is like no one else's. Read it!

My favorite aspect of Matt's writing is the deftness with which he balances plaintive haunting imagery with absolutely hysterical humor. This play is heartbreaking and lovely, and absolutely of the time. I recommend it to anyone who's struggling with anxieties about the end of the world.

Magical, provocative, and dangerous, this play is all at once poetic and conversational, conceptual and tactile, and enormously wide and eerily specific. Minnicino has taken characters who have the ability to be anything and everything and presented them as precisely crafted women, each particular and extraordinary in her own right. This is a gorgeous play about sisterhood, love, magic, and, of course, fate.

This play is so magical! Whether the character be mortal or immortal, this play has incredible roles for women. It's funny, heartbreaking, romantic, and brutal. I can't wait to see a production of it.

This is the kind of play that sticks in your head for days and makes you furious you didn't find it sooner. A magical look at the forces in our world that might themselves be yearning for more, and the fundamental way that empathy and emotion can change the world, wyrd is a romantic, heartbreaking, and overall thrilling theatrical achievement that dares to make the abject nature of reality and the mortifying ordeal of being known into one of the most layered scripts in recent memory.

I read this play (as a screening reader for a conference) in October, and I am still thinking about it in May. Funny, crushing, intelligent and powerful, it ticked every box for me, including wonderful and deep roles for multiple women.