←Recommendations of A Tragedy Of Owls

I had the wonderful opportunity to direct this piece and see it come to the life, and with it came the honor of watching the story grip everyone who saw it. The relationship between the two characters is expertly written, balancing historical accuracy and dramatization in a masterful way. The dialogue is gorgeous and intelligent, while never overstaying its welcome. This play asks us one simple question: what would you risk?

This short script is contributing to such big cultural work, uncovering, uplifting & humanizing the stories of the many LGBTQ+ people who resisted the Nazis & were so often both murdered by the enemy & erased by their supposed allies after the war. This script could be a valuable educational resource for young people both for its historic content & the powerful questions it asks about the choices people make when they have had every good choice taken away.

John Mabey's "A Tragedy of Owls" is a psddionate play that explored the heart of resistance during WWII. It's a compelling homage to unsung heroes, blending historical truth with dramatic flair. A must-read for those interested in the intersection of war, identity, and courage. Its profound narrative promises to leave a lasting impact.

A phenomenal two-hander that brings to light the unheralded story of Willem Arondeus, Lau Mazirel and Sjoerd Bakker, Dutch resistance fighters who more than earned their place in world history and LGBTQ history. John Mabey does their story justice with spare staging, tight storytelling and compelling dialogue.
I had the pleasure of hearing this play on the "Gather By the Ghost Light" podcast and highly recommend both.

Alright! Now it's my turn to give this piece a heartfelt recommendation. While reading "A Tragedy of Owls", I was reminded of Kosinski's "The Painted Bird", Arthur Miller's "Incident at Vichy" and Harold Pinter's "One For The Road", visions of a historical past or a dystopian "present" that, like Mr. Mabey's short play, are all too frighteningly relevant today. This is the 2nd work of John Mabey's that I have read. I'm certainly looking forward to indulging in more!

A tour de force of a ten minute play. Mabey tenderfully and masterfully weaves what might have been said with what we know was said during the last conversation between Lau Mazirel and Willem Arondeus. If you have no idea who these people were…well, you will. This is a powerful scene of truth, sacrifice, and identity standing against the arms of unspeakable evil. I, for one, now know. And I generously thank Mabey for crafting (and sharing) these words.

We produced an audio version of this script in our Season 4 line-up (https://www.gatherbytheghostlight.com/s4e5). This script is a fascinating character study and John Mabey thoroughly did his part in bringing this real life event to the page. He took this historically documented moment and sculpted believable dialogue for these two characters in a remarkable way. Mabey is a master of his craft and did a wonderful job honoring Willem's plea "Let it be known".

Mabey's tightly crafted short play brings attention to the courage of Willem Arondeus, a gay member of the Dutch anti-Nazi resistance and his final words. To quote Arthur Miller, "Attention must be paid" and this world's heroes honored. While recently produced on stage in Phoenix and London, an audio version is available at Gather By the Ghostlight: https://www.podpage.com/gather-by-the-ghost-light/a-tragedy-of-owls-by-…

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.”

It only takes a few seconds for Mabey’s play to get to the line, “Even your wounds have wounds.” At that moment, I thought, okay; this one might hurt a little. And it did, in all the right ways. A Tragedy of Owls does what I think all good historical fiction does: It dramatizes real events and real people in ways that make those things personal, that erase the emotional distance of history and transform it from a chronicle of external events that happened elsewhere to others into something that makes us feel our own presence on the timeline.