Wink

by Jen Silverman

Wink follows unhappy housewife Sofie and her breadwinning husband Gregor, who both seek weekly counseling from an unorthodox therapist, Doctor Frans. Their current topic of disagreement: Wink. When Wink goes missing, violent desires, domestic anarchy, and feline vengeance emerge, threatening the neatly ordered reality Sophie, Gregor, and Doctor Frans have constructed.

Genres: Plays

58 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2019

About the author

Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer. Born in the U.S., she was raised across the U.S., Europe and Asia. Her theatre work includes The Moors (Yale Repertory Theatre premiere, off-Broadway with The Playwrights Realm, Susan Smith Blackburn finalist); The Roommate (Actor’s Theatre of Louisville Humana world premiere, multiple regional productions including South Coast Rep, SF Playhouse and Williamstown Theatre Festival, upcoming at Steppenwolf); Phoebe In Winter (Off-off Broadway with Clubbed Thumb); Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties (Woolly Mammoth premiere); and All the Roads Home, a play with songs (Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park premiere).

Jen is a member of New Dramatists, a Core Writer at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis, an affiliated artist with SPACE on Ryder Farm, and has developed work with the O’Neill, New York Theatre Workshop, Playpenn, Portland Center Stage, The Ground Floor Residency at Berkeley Rep, and the Royal Court in London among other places. She’s a two-time MacDowell fellow, recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, the Helen Merrill Award, an LMCC Fellowship, and the Yale Drama Series Award. She was the 2016-2017 Playwrights of New York (PoNY) Fellow at the Lark. Jen has a two-book deal with Random House for a collection of stories (The Island Dwellers, pub date May 1, 2018) and a novel. Education: Brown, Iowa Playwrights Workshop, Juilliard.

Reviews

[Nick K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic satire! Jen Silverman's writing really speaks to me. It's odd, intelligent, fun and so honest. Not for everyone but I am such a fan!

[Sara Alanis · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5 ⭐️
I wasn’t expecting for the freaky cat to make me this sad but here we are. Idk what Jen Silverman is putting into their plays but I need them to keep doing it.

[Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jen Silverman is one of my favorite contemporary playwrights. The dramatic words she builds are filled to the brim with tension and conflict on every level. She crafts characters that feel so deeply that no matter what, their actions (as evil as they may seem) make so much sense. Wink is about a husband and wife, a skinned cat, and their therapist. The husband and wife are having marital issues and the husband just skinned the wife’s cat. The cat in question is not, in fact, dead and visits the therapist both the husband and wife are seeing. The cat and the therapist have a weird relationship and things get tense.

This play was wonderfully hilarious and dark. It’s Jen Silverman in her prime. I fell in love with her play The Moors when I was cast as the mastiff my freshman year of college and Wink continues that trend. The fantastical elements of the play are simply beautiful and so well written. Silverman is a playwright everyone should know.

[Davin Broadhurst · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t think I’ve got to the point in my life journey to really understand this genre. Maybe I would enjoy it more if I saw it performed, but I still don’t understand the point of the surrealist satire kind of writing. If marital problems are the main theme then.. why can’t you write about those? I feel like I’m not smart enough for this.

[Colton Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely wacky fucking ride. This play singlehandedly has the most sensual dialogue I have ever read (and it's between a skinned cat and a lonely therapist). Really interesting characters with heightened flaws that made this play a blast to read. I hope to be in this play one of these days.

[Audrey Hunter · Rating 5 out of 5]

jen silverman is my hero. batshit crazy play. is there anything jen can't do? no. i don't think there is.

[Katie Calahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

So weird! I loved it! Dark humor for sure, but I kept laughing!