Babs Brown

The premise and stakes of the story are genuinely strong, and setting a very current issue in a future, space-set world is an interesting move, though I'd push back on calling it "sci-fi," since the label felt more like marketing than a description of what the show actually is.

The emotional core rang true throughout and was clearly the strongest choice in the piece, even if the message felt heavy-handed and repeated more than it needed to; a bit more trust in the audience would go a long way. The male lead delivers a strong performance, and I loved the choice to make the manager a bot. The female lead's performance started at full intensity and had nowhere left to build over the hour, which flattened some of the tension elsewhere. Staging-wise, it felt rigid and leans more on set, props, and projections than it needs to, especially since the projections undercut a big reveal that would have hit harder without them. At 60 minutes, this felt like it could be tightened to 45. The playwright has a strong emotional instinct, and just needs some more seasoning in pacing and craft to fully land it.

The message about missed conversations and "what ifs" gets buried under 90 minutes of what feels like unedited diary entries and I found myself wanting to leave partway through. Random film/dated Death Cab for Cutie references, a lot of poop jokes, and a character sharing the playwright's own name reinforced the sense of personal catharsis over crafted and intentional theatre. Direction was predictable and bland, and I found the lead's dialogue was often hard to hear from my seat. Too many characters crowd out the central relationship, leaving two performers carrying weight the script doesn't earn. If deeply personal, melancholic work about creative insecurity is your thing, this may land better for you than it did for me.