←Recommendations of French Boy Cigarettes

The community of Playwrights Foundation Bay Area literary council readers advanced French Boy Cigarettes as a finalist for the 47th Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

This script is a tight and beautifully constructed thriller, which explores highly nuanced themes of migration, memory, and parenthood while keeping the audience on a razor’s edge.

We hope this play is considered for further development and investigation, and finds dedicated collaborators in its journey towards production.

Malley is one of the few playwrights still writing GREAT roles that actors would dream to sink their teeth into. Najla and Jawad are two such roles. It is also so fantastic to read a play that begs you to sit in its discomfort and contradictions. A lesser playwright would want you to overlook that both Jawad AND Tommy face legitimate terror (and attraction for each other) but the play's brilliance is it never lets you escape the impossible situation all 3 central characters have been placed in.

A play that's as funny as it is distressing. There is so much to admire and enjoy in Malley's play--from the dialogue, to the humor, to the theatricality, to the poetry--but the thing I find most moving, the thing I keep coming back to, is the rare depiction of a grandmother and her grandson grappling with the ways in which the men in their romantic lives have used and hurt them. Like grandmother like grandson. A play that lets every actor shine. I can't wait to see it produced.

What a well-observed play with nuanced, troubled, and sympathetic characters. The stuff of this play has been so historically reserved for the straight, white antiheroes of Sam Shepard and the like. Najla, Jawad, Tommy, and his mother are so multidimensional and, here, Forest Malley explores big truths about family, domestic abuse, and relationships while always keeping a clear eye on the intersectional identities of his characters and how they intertwine with those larger themes. There are sublime moments of theatricality as the pressure-cooking builds. I'd love to see these characters realized in a production!

This is a tense, beautifully written play about the murkiness of right and wrong.