I’ve read thousands of new plays in my time as a teacher and a reader for various prizes. The best ones are always about something large, and usually terrible, coming into someone’s life, usually someone who is completely unprepared and consequently ill equipped to deal with it. These stories make the best plays because these terrible things are the ones that terrify us, that change us; they are the things we think we could not survive. We watch these plays as if they were happening to us. We watch for clues to how we might navigate the treacherous territory. We ask ourselves questions like “Why has this terrible thing happened?” and “Who is at fault here?” and “What must I do to ensure that this never happens to me?” Finally, depending on the skill of the writer and his or her knowledge of human life, the best plays always lead to the same point, a moment of recognition and relief. Sometimes there is redemption, sometimes there is forgiveness, but there is always a kind of peace that descends as the playwright brings order to the disorder, lifting the veil of shame and banishing the fear and violence that have ruled the stage.

Jen Silverman’s play Still is such a play. It was discovered by an early reader, and heartily endorsed by the rest of the reader panel. When I read it, I knew immediately it was our winner. I have read other plays on the subject of a stillborn child, but none that live in such an existential plane, none as elegant in formal structure, none with language both surreal and trashy, none as funny, and none as moving. The refraction of the unbearable grief through the lives of all the characters, not just that of the mother, is the truly distinguishing characteristic of this play. The presence of the child himself is the mark of a master in the making.

We live with the dead child, Constantinople, for nearly a week as he searches for his mother, as his just born–just dead consciousness struggles to reconnect with someone he knows only by the sound of her crying. That he first encounters a pregnant dominatrix and a guilt-stricken midwife is no more surprising than his tall pale body and his operatic vocabulary. His delights and fears, his experiments and observations are made all the more acute by the life that is fading from him as we watch. He is the eternal wanderer, caught between birth and death, fearing he will never know love, only loss.