Furloughs Paradise Reviews
Los Angeles Times- Highly Recommended
"...This lyrical drama, choreographed by Dell Howlett, floats at times like a movement-theater piece reaching for the heavens. The acting is grounded in realism but the writing refuses to keep the characters under lock and key. Life may have thrown up walls but nothing can block their yearning."
Stage and Cinema- Recommended
"...In Furlough's Paradise, a. k. payne has crafted something that moves like a whisper but hits like a reckoning. Now in its West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, this 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize-winning one-act plants two women in a fractured apartment and lets memory, grief, and buried rage do the heavy lifting. Sade is on a three-day furlough from prison. Mina has returned home following the death of Sade's mother, Lashonda. They're cousins. They're strangers. They're mirrors. What unfolds over a single weekend is part ritual, part reckoning."
Angeles Stage- Recommended
"...The conversations between Mina and Sade have an elliptical quality at times. I had to look up a few of the pop-cultural references sprinkled through the script. But I ultimately found the relationship between the two characters quite moving - emotionally as well as choreographically. Rogers and Wise and the design team entrance through much of the play's 75 minutes."
LA Theatrix- Highly Recommended
"...Winner of the 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, "Furlough's Paradise" offers a fresh take on difficult topics of legacy, race and gender as inflected through these young women. Hearing them speak so forthrightly and openly on how it feels to be them and how they aspire to a freedom that is their birthright as humans is moving, engaging and, at times, transcendent."
Stage Raw- Highly Recommended
"...Furlough's Paradise is about many things. Written by a.k. payne and directed by Tinashe Kajese-Bolton, this deep lyrical play features Kacie Rogers and DeWanda Wise as two cousins at a crossroads following the death of the last family member to link them together. The performances are sterling, while the production is a director's coup, a remarkable meld of stagecraft and portrayal that renders a kaleidoscopic portrait of two individuals of color, at odds with the world and themselves."
Indulge Magazine- Highly Recommended
"...In Furlough's Paradise, now receiving its West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse under the assured direction of Tinashe Kajese-Bolden, playwright a.k. payne distills a lifetime of memory, hurt, and kinship into seventy-five electric minutes. Winner of the 2024 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, this two-hander strips away pretense and performance, laying bare the tangle of identity, class, and familial reckoning through a sharply wrought reunion between two cousins shaped'and separated'by fate."
Larchmont Buzz- Highly Recommended
"...Furlough's Paradise is an 80-minute, two-person play that dons the larger garb of a theater extravaganza. With cinematic projections and performance art incorporating dance and spoken word, with set and lighting transformations, it's big and awesome to behold. Yet it's most powerful when it's small: when its two characters simply hang out and talk to each other."
Broadway World- Recommended
"...Director Tinashe Kajese-Bolden allows the lyricism of the writing to take its time, giving the show a contemplative rhythm. Rogers and Wise give shades of gray to their respective characters, deepening them with every turn. The set of Mina's house by Chika Shimizu is multilayered with shadows and secrets mirroring the story. Choreography by Dell Howlett and Naomi C. Walley adds dimension to the characters, the plot, and the experience. The only drawback is that the plot is sometimes difficult to follow. Much is hinted at or referenced only briefly (which simply means you must pay close attention throughout), though that also adds to the play's sense of other worldliness."