O Earth makes Broadway World's 11 Superb New Theatrical Experiences from 2016 list

"The Foundry once again dropped a woke-bomb on our hurting world with Casey Llewellyn's ambitious fantasia on contemporary queerness. The deeply moving play put a rainbow of queer characters in a flexible and timeless world of dirt and doors (impeccably designed Adam Rigg) to dialogue on the queer. The central lovers of Our Town (innocently and passionately enacted by Kristen Sieh and Jess Barbagallo) run away and meet Ellen Degeneres (Moe Aneglos, an enthusiastic dead ringer) and Portia DeRossi (Emily Davis in one of the year's most intricately layered performances) while Thornton Wilder (a soulful Tommy Heleringer) befriends a whale: all under the watch of The Stage Manager (Donnetta Lavinia Grays showing dutiful authority) who is getting tired of telling stories "about these white people." Llewellyn's many threads organically meld to become an essential conversation with a diverse and spectacular ensemble."

See the full list here. 

O, Earth makes Advocate's Top Ten New York Theater of 2016

"7. O, Earth
Using commingling characters like Sylvia Rivera and Ellen DeGeneres, Casey Llewellyn put an inspired and inspiring queer twist on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, playfully examining our community’s history and other universal mysteries. With fearless director Dustin Wills and a largely LGBT cast that included Moe Angelos and Jess Barbagallo, Foundry Theatre’s ambitious world premiere was almost too wonderful for anybody to realize it."

Wait, no one realized it? Like life? #ThingstochalkuptoanOurTownreference

I Am Bleeding All Over the Place: A Living History Tour, my collaboration with Brooke O'Harra, got an honorable mention too! 

See full list including many friends here!

Interview in The Brooklyn Rail about O, Earth

I talked to playwright Susan Soon He Stanton for an interview in The Brooklyn Rail. It was a great conversation! 

"Rail: Something that strikes me in your writing and in your performance art is your relationship with theatricality and intimacy.

Llewellyn: I think those are the things I care about. Maybe they are one thing. Theater is intimacy. I’m obsessed with the audience. I’m obsessed with being in a room together, and being in a group in a room together with whatever a play or a theater experience is—or a work of art that is physicalized. It’s connected to everything to me. This art is something that can only be experienced when we breathe all the same air in the same room. The relationship with the audience is what makes theatricality. If you are in an audience, you want something to happen to you. I don’t want to watch someone else’s story. I’m obsessed with where the audience is in the story and what their experience is. I don’t just want to tell a story and have other people witness it. I’m trying to create work that will allow people go through an experience together."

Read the full interview here.

O, Earth is a Time Out New York Critic's Pick!

"One of the loveliest things—in an absolute avalanche of lovely things—about Casey Llewellyn's wide-ranging piece is her title. In calling it O, Earth, Llewellyn quotes from the end of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, when Emily's overwhelmed spirit exclaims, “Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” This is not so surprising; Llewellyn's postmodern pop-threnody takes Wilder's masterpiece as its matter and prime mover. But the playwright also reflects the fragment through a prism. Written in just that dropped-h way, Llewellyn's title also harkens to Jeremiah (“O, earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord”); say the phrase, you hear the echoes. Llewellyn hides an encompassing lamentation in the words that even Wilder, past master of heartbreak, didn't amplify.

Is that a lot to pin on a title? Not if you see the play itself, which is confident, lyrical, hilarious, unabashedly literate and unapologetically political. It also holds the Wilder text as gently as a robin's egg." --Helen Shaw

Wow! Thanks Helen Shaw for this amazing review! Read the whole thing here. And get your tickets before they're gone! 

Interview with Adam Szymkowicz on for his "I Interview Playwrights" blog

Check out the interview here! Excerpt about O, Earth below: 

"Q:  Tell me about O, Earth.

A:  O, Earth is an exploration of what we're doing here living on earth. It started with reckoning with the theatrical and cultural inheritance of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and takes up many of his themes and concerns while incorporating my own. The characters in the play are concerned with happiness, justice, themselves, each other, their and others' place in the world. I am concerned in the play with the being here-ness and being here together-ness of theater and life (the play will also be at HERE!), so in the play very strange combination of iconic characters reckon with this (ghosts and living people, characters and real people). Part of what I'm interested in is how specificity and universality are represented in theater, and the real consequences of representation and visibility. We each experience life from a singular perspective, so O, Earth is a bunch of very different characters’ engagement with the universal experiences we all share: everyday life, love, and death. Something else specific that I am grappling with in the play is this current moment in gay/queer/trans politics and history in which some of us (white, cisgendered, middle class or rich gay or queer people) have been invited to join the mainstream in the form of unprecedented access to privilege (cultural acceptance, marriage, jobs, visibility, etc.), while issues that affect members of the queer/trans/gay community with less privilege disproportionately have been deprioritized in gay politics (trans and gender non-conforming peoples’ rights, racial justice, de-criminalization of sex work, housing for youth, police profiling, etc.). Even though the most marginalized members of our community are responsible for much of the resistance that has allowed us to get here. Vastly different experiences, access, and choices in the “community” have changed our sense of “our” since people fought together under the banner of gay rights in the last century. So I am thinking about that too. And it’s funny."