Press Quotes
STEEPLE JACK
“Like a well-cut diamond with many shining facets, playwright Dennis J Reardon has given theater audiences a quality gem in STEEPLE JACK. Set in rural Kansas, STEEPLE JACK is about bare bones existence: life and death, youth and maturity, males and females, good and evil, the relationships that hold life together and the need for love in the face of grief … a richly textured work, peopled with equally textured characters and dialogue … the mystic Steeple Jack conveys a sympathetic personality that is, despite his tramp-like appearance, otherworldly and eerily distant without seeming like something born of monster movies.” —The Bloomington Herald-Times
THE PEER PANEL
“Funny and incisive, THE PEER PANEL shapes a meditation on the future of the American theater into an absorbing, funny, and gracefully structured play … THE PEER PANEL evades its potential for caricature, thanks largely to Reardon’s uncanny command of each character’s voice … But THE PEER PANEL, while rooted in its characters’ preoccupations, isn’t just about theater. It’s also about the foundations of personal aesthetic preferences, about the ways in which culture and ideology and prejudice influence what we like — and how differences in taste can obstruct interpersonal connections. Sort of like Yasmina Reza’s ‘ART,’ only without the tedium.” —The Bloomington Herald-Times
THE MISADVENTURES OF CYNTHIA M
“[Cynthia] is quite a character. She’s an angry working girl who first seems a viper, then a bit more sympathetic and finally almost surrealistically transcendent. She’s always struggling to shed her skin. One character, charitably says, ‘She was born short of patience.’ Whether Cynthia’s making some extra money modeling lingerie for Busy Beaver or putting off her husband with her “not tonight honey nightgown,” she’s always fascinatingly and surprisingly inventing herself.” —George Walker, The Herald Times