Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly
What happens when an illness of tsunami-like proportions lays waste to your life?
In Emilie Beck’s family drama Sovereign Body, Anna (Taylor Gilbert), a chef and restaurateur, lives happily with her husband (Kevin McCorkle), mom (Bryna Weiss) and two daughters: 20-year-old Callie (Dani Stephens), bursting to be out on her own, and Evie (Hannah Mae Sturges), a brainy opinionated teenager. Read more..
Steven Leigh Morris – Stage Raw
Don’t let Emilie Beck’s new play fool you. It looks and sounds like it’s about a Pasadena family who happen to be atheists, but its poetical tentacles reach so much further beyond the tropes of the play’s squabbling upper-middle-class tribe. After all, the play isn’t just set in Pasadena, it’s set in Pasadena during “a time of drought.” That’s the first hint that this play has theology in its heart. Read more…
Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter
Susan Sontag, in perhaps her most consequential work, argued with terminal persuasiveness that our drive to characterize illness as a symptom of moral culpability disables our ability to grapple with its reality, which is incontrovertibly oblivious to whether or not we comprehend it. Emilie Beck in her world premiere play, Sovereign Body, manages with some success both to invoke our need to confront fears of debilitation with symbolic fancies and to drive home the inexorable facts of mortality. Read more…