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This book of plays sits on a shelf in my head alongside Camus, Satre, Ingmar Bergman, Harold & Maude, Dave Eggars, Nick Drake, and several other GREAT works I can't put my finger on at the moment. It is serious, it is funny, and it is poignant. Despite some time-bending/shape-shifting plot abstractions, it feels real and it feels honest. It is, at times, intentionally absurd, which seems to me to be a reflection of the sort of conflicting inner dialogue we all have swishing around in our head at times, as well as the deceptive elusiveness of reality: "I could be this, I could be that" or "It is like this, it is like that". If you think you know reality, you don't know much, now, do you? But, you can examine it, pick it apart, experience it, revel in it, be confused by it and hopefully, over time, understand it. I am surprised that I haven't heard more about this book in the typical circles of down-to-earth, honest-to-goodness “fringe dwellers”– you know the type: truth seekers, music lovers, bookworms who are slightly cut off from society not by a choice to simply be “different”, but by an honest weeding-out process of preference; people on the cusp of understanding purposeful existence rather than mediocrity and day-to-numbness. These people actively persue what interests them out of broadly ranging curiosity or finely tuned interest. They can't understand themselves very well or others very well and are not afraid of this: they understand that understanding is something that needs to be understood. They take a wild stab in the dark seeking to pick something meaningful out of the void or perform meticulous research, hoping to find some particular piece of a puzzle they are putting together at their own pace. These are the people who feel the need to experience things for themselves to know the true quality of the experience, whether good or bad, who live life as though there is something just out of their reach they might discover one day. They have learned the art of conversation through intense introspection, familiarity with self-doubt and self-discipline. They have become self-assured thanks to their own flailing trials of life. And they are not ashamed to tell you what they've learned, what they've done or how they feel. This book is for those people. It is worth every penny.
- Nathan A. Snyder