Review: FERTILE GROUND 2026 - REVIEW ROUNDUP #2

We’re halfway through this year’s Fertile Ground Festival, and I have seen several excellent shows! Here are my thoughts about the latest (see my first review roundup here).

Taking Liberties

Part concert, part theatre, part sociological experiment – this is a show nearly impossible to describe without spoiling what makes it worth seeing.

Pianists Jennifer Wright and Kathleen Supové perform an improvised duet, but the audience isn't just watching. They are, collectively, given a task, which can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways, ranging from unobtrusive to full-on interfering. Your choices reshape both the music and the experience in real time.

The piece examines women's agency and bodily autonomy by inverting the traditional performer/audience relationship: the pianists become a canvas, and the interesting question becomes you. How do you move through a space that isn't quite yours to occupy? What do you do when given implicit permission (or implicit pressure) to do almost anything?

I'm being deliberately vague. I believe the show will pop up again, and I don’t want to ruin it. What I can tell you: this has been the Fertile Ground show I've talked about most so far. It was unlike anything I've seen, and I came out having learned something about myself and the people I watched it with. Yes, it might push you out of your comfort zone. But they do give you cookies.

The Compulsory Best Friendship of Limmy and Wags

Part of the LineStorm Playwrights reading series, Sara Jean Accuardi's gorgeous new play takes on family, friendship, and the nature-vs-nurture question through the lens of two women who discover their IVF embryos were switched.

Nina and Mina couldn't be more different. Nina is married, financially comfortable, already raising a young son. Mina is single, financially stretched, and saved up for years to fulfill her dream of becoming a mother. Their children, nicknamed Limmy and Wags, are just as distinct from each other, which raises the play's central question: are they more like the mothers who share their DNA, or the ones whose wombs they occupied? Did Nina and Mina make the right choice about their families? What makes a family anyway?

Accuardi has a gift for balancing emotional weight with just enough comedy to keep the air in the room. Even as a staged reading with minimal rehearsal, Kaia Maarja Hillier and Jacquelle Davis were excellent as Nina/Limmy and Mina/Wags. The two are best friends in real life, and that bond can be felt throughout the piece, quietly reinforcing everything the play is examining. Jonathan Hernandez also appeared in several roles. If anyone is looking to produce this (and someone definitely should): use this exact cast.

The View From Here

Also part of LineStorm Playwrights reading series, E.M. Lewis's new play is about the community you find when you're not looking for it. Elsie (Vana O'Brien) is isolated in rural Oregon, her telephone her only lifeline. She's finally called hospice. The person who shows up is Cheyenne (Taya Dixon), a young librarian and first-time hospice trainee who’s grieving her own mother. Then Dylan (Samuel Campbell) arrives with an armchair to replace Elsie’s broken one, and his own brush with death in tow. None of them planned to spend the afternoon together or knew how much they needed to.

Lewis has an unrivaled ability to find exactly the heart of a thing, which she does here using the simple idea of strangers coming together for a common purpose, along with a touch of magical realism. I'd love to see it fully produced, not just because it's beautiful, but because the play calls for theatrical invention that would be really fun to see realized on stage.

Wasted

In this staged reading of Danny Walker’s new play, a small town deals with the ravages of addiction. Set in a long-running family pharmacy, the play explores how grief, financial precarity, and the slow erosion of the American middle class can pull down an entire community.

Junior (Max Bernsohn) is newly home from college (or somewhere). He’s broke and has moved back in with his mom, planning to help out at the family’s pharmacy. The town has changed a lot since he’s been gone. Storefronts are abandoned, his favorite noodle shop has closed down, and opioids have taken hold of many of the residents. It’s not an easy place for Junior, who recently lost his father and struggles with alcoholism, to find his footing.

Everyone in the play is a bit lost – Junior; his mom, Louise (Lori Van Dreal), who has become the town’s major opioid supplier; Denise (Monika Milani), who used to visit the pharmacy as a child and is now charged with bringing law enforcement into the picture; Syd (Lex Bolsinger), who will do anything to fuel her addiction. Tariq (Jasper Bracely), Junior’s childhood friend, is the sole source of optimism. He’s planning to run for city council, but may have to set that ambition aside.

Wasted poses complex questions about how communities break down and whether it’s even possible to put them back together. As in life, the answers are far from easy.

Igniting Desire: Erotic Stories from the Second Half of Life

In my several years of covering Fertile Ground, Igniting Desire is the only show I've ever seen sell out and extend its run several weeks before the festival even started. Eleanor O'Brien's latest production, a staged reading featuring ten women ages 50 to 80+ telling original erotic stories, shows exactly why she's able to attract that kind of crowd.

If you've been to any of O'Brien's shows before, you know they're steamy. This one spotlights stories we don't often get to hear: about holding onto, or more often rediscovering, sensuality and sexuality during a phase of life when women are usually expected to fade into the background. They range from a personal essay about going to a queer dance club solo ("Belonging," written and performed by Tanya Awabdy), to an incredibly sexy spoken word poem ("Ease Your Pain," written and performed by Blacque Butterfly), to a full-throated reclamation of the most-hated word in the English language ("Moist," written by Eleanor O'Brien and performed by Katie Strong).

I've always found O'Brien's shows engaging and just a little scary. She talks openly about things my Lutheran upbringing taught me to keep quiet about (which, it turns out, is most of the good stuff). Now, especially because I’m pushing 50, this show feels like liberation. These women are in the thick of their desires, their bodies, not retreating from any of it. It's uplifting, life-affirming, and a super sexy night at the theatre.

This one is for anyone who was ever told, explicitly or not. that their desire was too much, or not enough. There are four more shows, Tuesday through Friday evening this week. Go.

Keepers

How do we communicate when the systems we rely on break down? Do our rituals serve us, or just keep us from seeing what's actually out there?

Keepers, devised and performed by Olga Kravtsova and Piper Francis, uses movement and light to sit with questions like these. On the surface, this piece is about two lighthouse keepers monitoring a situation that has clearly gone wrong. But the deeper question, at least for me, was whether it's even possible to keep a line of communication open between two people.

This is experimental theatre, and I suspect everyone in the audience came away with a different interpretation. What it did for me was evoke something hard to name: the feeling of being lost, of confidence quietly curdling into uncertainty, and then (briefly, unexpectedly) the feeling of genuine connection.

As with all of Kravtsova’s work that I’ve seen, this isn't passive theatre. It asks you to meet it halfway, and rewards you for doing so. The work is still in development. I’ll be curious to see where it goes from here.

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Review: FERTILE GROUND 2026 - REVIEW ROUNDUP #2

4/20/2026