Press
Below are some reviews of productions of Stefanie's plays. For more information on the plays themselves, please visit the Plays section of the site.
Honey Brown Eyes
Save
Me
The
Fear Project
Haunted
and Leaving
Profiles and Interviews
Peter Marks of the Washington Post profiles Stefanie and the world premiere of Honey Brown Eyes at Theater J. Read the article here.
Robyn Mincher interviews Stefanie for Express Night Out. Read the interview here.
Honey Brown Eyes
“Yet for all the epic-scale horror dramatized in Stefanie Zadravec's admirable nail-biter of a play — which is receiving a world premiere at Theater J — it is through sighs and other tiny markers that we get the most incisive tally of the conflict's toll. Pink backpacks, fresh oranges, the background noise from a sitcom's laugh track: The work is filled, too, with reminders of the shrugging everyday, the blandness of normal life that under desperate circumstances can suddenly seem so precious.
"'Honey Brown Eyes' is, in a sense, itself an expression of shock at how the latticework of a civilized country can come unglued overnight.
“...Zadravec's drama makes for an absorbing evening, especially when it lets its traumatized characters reveal, in muted exchanges, who they were before the nation broke down into armed camps of Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims.
“Although each character is allowed to show some mettle, Zadravec doesn't overplay the heroism. Putting them all around kitchen sinks, she wants us to see how, in the midst of incomprehensible cruelty, tragedy could come to be something utterly average.”
— Peter Marks, The Washington Post, 10/28/2008
"It's things like Serbian postpunk and American TV, the angularities of Ekaterina Velika and the melancholy absurdities of ALF, that backdrop the atrocities and make them seem so impossibly surreal. Zadravec even employs the jovial cadences of the network gameshow host — though in a way that might make you shudder the next time your TiVo suggestions include an episode of Deal or No Deal. Because as it serves up these slices of nostalgia — as it name-checks everything from MTV and The Cosby Show to (in the second act, in another city, with another mismatched pair) "It Takes Two" and Mahler — as it sets up its jokes delivers its painfully torqued punch lines, Honey Brown Eyes, never lets the audience forget the brutalities that consumed a nation that had once papered over its differences with the paste and pulp of such consumables. The small cruelties and the petty thieving, the individual murders and the neighborhood slaughters, the rape camps and the 'cleansings' — Zadravec references them in ways both offhand and ominous, and the result is a play that sometimes packs the make-you-jump punch of (another signal pop-culture influence?) the very best horror movies."
— Washington City Paper
"The acrid violence of these scenes takes your breath away, but what deepens the effect are the touchstone references to pop culture (The Cure, MTV, the TV sitcoms 'Alf' and 'The Cosby Show') that humanize the exchanges and make the audience unable to distance themselves from the situation before them.
"Honey Brown Eyes is not an easy play to watch, and it does not give easy answers. Instead, It allows us to experience the ways humanity and horror coexist in a war where the 'enemy' is not made up of faceless strangers, but of people you know and perhaps once loved."
— The Washington Times
"Stefanie Zadravec's Honey Brown Eyes at Theater J is a passionate, thought-provoking play about war, whose serious message is intensified by its implied comments on youth, age, courage and the disastrous effects of conflict — not just on nations but on brothers and friends."
— The Examiner
"Playwright Stefanie Zadravec is really doing something impressive here, drawing us in so intimately into the world these players inhabit, a world that would seemingly seem rather similar to ours, if not for the interrupting atrocities."
— dcist
"Playwright Stefanie Zadravec, hones in on the personal, rather than the political or military to lift the shroud on the everyday tragedies of living — and dying — in a war zone. Honey Brown Eyes takes place away from the blare of news reports and morning paper's headlines, ending the work a keener sense of reality and brutality.
"The background noise of war accompanying the muffled screams and gunfire from house-to-house combat, is innocuously insipid and American, suggesting the global reach of pop culture, but the inadequacy of politics to reach a solution.
— Washington Jewish Week
"...meticulous writing..."
— metro weekly
"...explosive and disturbingly real..."
— DC Theatre Scene
Save Me
An emotional, thought-provoking evening of entertaining theatre...Save
Me delights in offering many arguments on all the sides of a very thorny
issue. That many are left unanswered or resolved is perplexing and, in the
end, satisfying...a comfortable framework with newly found quirks and ideas.
Thank God—literally!”
— broadwayworld.com
“A very keen eye towards character.”
— broadwayworld.com
The Fear Project
“Chilling…”
— The New York Post
“Solid, thoughtful, and entertaining…”
— Time Out New York
“Cathartic comedy, scathing satire, and piercing drama... an impressive
collage of our waking nightmares.”
— theatremania.com
“A collection of seven brilliantly performed and entertaining short plays.”
— The L Magazine
“An entertaining evening that eschews cliché. Hilarious...bright and wacky…simultaneously
wild and world-weary, funny and sad.”
— Backstage
“The Fear Project is insightful, provocative, frequently funny, and beautifully
staged.”
— theatrescene.net
Haunted and Leaving
“And top honors among the playwrights must go to Stefanie Zadravec,
who contributes both the opening and closing numbers. The first, Leaving,
about the disintegration of a Connecticut couple when they hear about a disaster
from a TV newscast, is a sharp living room social critique...”
— theatrescene.net
“New Yorkers will find particular resonance in such segments as [Zadravec’s]
Leaving...”
— New York Post
“Equally Compelling...is Stefanie Zadravec’s Haunted, where
a couple’s romantic getaway turns creepy in the middle of a storm.
Zadravec manages to indict the sort of man-to-woman violence that might be
found in a Lifetime movie, while also giving the short piece a grand
‘Twilight Zone’ feel. Van Cleve and Zadravec play the piece so
that each of Zadravec’s twists surprise grandly.”
— American Theatre Web
“The pieces’ brevity can limit their depth, but the playwrights
generally manage to ring some changes, as with Haunted, in which Zadravec
plays on the eerie similarities between the teen slasher-flick setup and
romantic rural getaways.”
— Time Out New York
“New Yorkers will find particular resonance in such segments as [Zadravec’s]
Leaving...”
— New York Post
"Stefanie Zadravec’s Haunted has “a wry edge and is well
played...”
— Backstage
“What’s lovely about this piece [Haunted] is how the mania
subsides into a meditation on trust and ambiguity, a celebration of human
connection as an antidote to irrational paranoia. It seems like the perfectly
placed coda to the entire evening.”
— theatrescene.net