Chelsea Marcantel
It follows the same characters through the three plays, several scientists pursuing their careers and love lives, using insights biology, chemistry, and neurology to explore their motivations.
Anais is a stereotypical "spoiled rich girl," but the play digs past her surface to discover her vulnerability, "[forcing] the audience to care about this socialite-trash.
[13] Writing about a 2019 production, reviewer Tina Collins calls the play "a thoughtful study of Amish life [that] slowly reveals the underlying complexity that characterizes the human condition as a whole.
Insider Louisville declared it, "“The most fun you will have at the theater this year … to call this play a “crowd pleaser” is a drastic understatement.”[19] Allie Fireel commented in an essay for HowlRound that, "Airness stays with the viewer after the last guitar chord has faded because of the way its complex layers ask the question ‘what is real?’ when it comes to families, groups, and societies.”[20] Airness won the American Theatre Critics Association's M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award in 2018; the award recognizes an emerging playwright, and carries as $1000 prize.
Her YouTube videos depicting lesser-known female saints capture the attention of an FBI counter-terrorism agent, and her search for meaning "makes her vulnerable to some dangerous advice.
"[23] In the play, reviewer Lily Janiak sees an indictment of America's "devoting so many resources to perceived terrorist threats of a particular ethnicity, nationality and gender while we ignore how poverty, downward mobility and social isolation sow the seeds of radicalization right in our heartland.
"[24] Also premiering in February 2019 was Marcantel's adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's play St. Joan, performed by the Delaware Theatre Company.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer Julia Klein appreciated Marcantel's "fine job of judiciously trimming Shaw’s talky text," but found that the "dialogue tends to slow the piece down.
Facciolo notes that the play was timed to coincide with the centennial anniversary of women's suffrage in the United States, but that St. Joan may be a better class hero than a feminist one, "an illiterate peasant girl [who] could rise to determine the fate of nations.
"[26] Gail Obenreder in Broad Street Review called the adaptation: "Worthy of Shaw... Marcantel seems to fear no peril.
"[30] Cincinnati's City Beat magazine said "the confines of a tiny house pressurize the play’s entertainment quotient, even if these characters are more caricatures.
Citizen Detective garnered a New York Times Critic's Pick, with reviewer Alexis Soloski observing “Marcantel clearly enjoys the online form, neatly juxtaposing the workaday tools of contemporary online culture — polls, slides, breakout rooms, screen sharing, chat, the mute button — with a lurid case nearly a century cold.”[37] Maureen Lee Lenker noted in Entertainment Weekly: “All in all, Citizen Detective is a diverting evening, a combination of game night with a theatrical endeavor, that offers some clues as how to execute entertaining interactive virtual theater.”[38] The show was extended due to popular demand, closing in February 2021 after 100 performances.
In March 2021, it was announced that Marcantel (along with collaborators Alan Schmuckler and Michael Mahler) had won a 2021 Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theatre from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The three-hander, commissioned by Signature as part of the Heidi Thomas Writers’ Initiative, follows the story of Luke, a young man who awakens from a medically-induced coma to find that he can hear the voices of the dead.
Grappling with both his newfound gift and the death of his father from COVID, this unlikely medium makes his way to the Spiritualist community of Lily Dale seeking advice and reconciliation with his skeptical sister Colleen, who has come along for the ride.
In Lily Dale, they are housed and instructed by a medium and intuitive named Shiloh, whose backstory turns out to be closer to Colleen's than Luke's.
Reviews of The Upstairs Department were overall positive, with MD Theatre Guide calling it, "A solid show in need of minor fine tuning... the plot itself is grounded and evocative, especially in its sensitive arc around Luke’s treatment of Colleen’s queerness and its portrayal of the horrible strangeness of the pandemic.
