Praise for
Barrie Cole:
Poet, Playwright, Essayist
Barrie Cole has this wizardly, alchemical capacity to break language into its constituent parts and wring its juices into a bucket of her own devising and to stir the contents of that bucket with a vigor and intensity that you feel like might leave your poor brain in a smoking husk were you to attempt it.
-- Ian Belknap , Founder/ Producer of Write Club
-- Ian Belknap , Founder/ Producer of Write Club
"Chicago monologist and playwright Barrie Cole has long been placing imaginary jars atop imaginary hills. Her ambiguously concrete work layers childlike simplicity over seasoned melancholy to produce piercing, wondrous images of charming, discomfiting transformation. You might mistake Cole’s work for the fables of a hyper-literate six-year-old who’s just discovered the reality of death."
— Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader
— Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader
"At her best, solo performer-turned-playwright Barrie Cole charms with her childlike, word-drunk poetic language, then delivers heartfelt revelations about life and mortality."
-- Jack Helbig, Chicago Reader
-- Jack Helbig, Chicago Reader
Praise for "Hamburgers and Disappointment"
"A beautiful, polyphonous portrait of city life."
-- Dmitry Samarov, Chicago Reader
"Tying together the improbable with the mundane through the lens of empathy (but never mere sentimentality) has been foundational to all of Cole’s work..."
-- Kerry Reid, Chicago Reader
-- Dmitry Samarov, Chicago Reader
"Tying together the improbable with the mundane through the lens of empathy (but never mere sentimentality) has been foundational to all of Cole’s work..."
-- Kerry Reid, Chicago Reader
Praise for "Elevator Tours"
"90 delectable minutes of poetry and word play. If you love language and poetry, this will be 90 minutes of bliss."
-- Nancy Bishop, Third Coast Review
"Cole mounts a powerful attack on our expectations. Her script becomes a kind of microtragedy, about two people using every ounce of their intelligence, creativity, goofy comic sensibilities, and vast immaturity to defeat whatever seems to make most sense."
-- Tony Adler, Chicago Reader
-- Nancy Bishop, Third Coast Review
"Cole mounts a powerful attack on our expectations. Her script becomes a kind of microtragedy, about two people using every ounce of their intelligence, creativity, goofy comic sensibilities, and vast immaturity to defeat whatever seems to make most sense."
-- Tony Adler, Chicago Reader
Praise for "I Love You Permanently"
"Barrie Cole is one of Chicago’s brightest playwrights. Her specialty seems to be the doomed relationship. Her script is smart without being snarky, and its dialogue manages to feel natural."
-- J. Scott Hill, Chicago Stage Review
"A fascination with words — their sounds, their meanings, their rhythms — has long been a defining quality of playwright Barrie Cole."
-- Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune
-- J. Scott Hill, Chicago Stage Review
"A fascination with words — their sounds, their meanings, their rhythms — has long been a defining quality of playwright Barrie Cole."
-- Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune
Praise for "Fruit Tree Backpack"
"Playwright Barrie Cole creates an examination of abstract personal conceptualizations that is casual, frantic, contemporary, absurd, accessible, sincere and ridiculous. In the seemingly silly conversations of a darling yet detached couple, Cole uncovers extraordinary analysis of art, art analysis, and the anti-analysis of artistic expression. Delightfully intellectual without being academic, Cole uncovers humor in places that few bother to look. The writing is self-aware, self-assured and self-aggrandizing; balancing in the perfect dose of silly so as not to take its serious revelations too seriously. Cole uncovers the idiosyncratic psychosis of human interaction at its most brilliantly funny and cleverly revealing by rendering absurd analogies that are dead on."
-- Venus Zarris, Chicago Stage Review,
-- Venus Zarris, Chicago Stage Review,