Reviews

"Pinteresque playwright Deen is a revelation with FLOOD." ... FLOOD's dialogue "is good, complex, and funny, and charged with barrels of meaning below that surface. “Flood” reminded me for all the world of Harold Pinter or Caryl Churchill's ominous, absurdist theater works, with a quality that is very much in a league with these revered masters."

BILL ESLER,
BUZZ NEWS

FLOOD is a splendid work, a truly contemporary take on absurdist theatre written with sharp and fresh relevance.

KELLY LUCK
BROADWAY WORLD

As a whole, [absurdist theater] has fallen out of style in the last 60 or 70 years. But Mashuq Mushtaq Deen’s new play FLOOD, which is currently having its world premiere at KC Rep, offers as good an argument as I can imagine in favor of a resurgence. ... A common, even fundamental structural throughline in the Theater of the Absurd is characters who refuse to acknowledge the preposterous circumstances of their surroundings, focusing instead on the quotidian elements of their own lives. As Deen makes explicitly clear, those themes are as relevant as they’ve ever been.

VIVIAN KANE,
KC STUDIO

[FLOOD is] a comic masterpiece that matches plays by Beckett and Churchill. It is one of my greatest professional honors to premiere the play.

KEN PRESTININZI,
CONN COLLEGE NEWS

DRAW THE CIRCLE is a singular theatrical experience. It concludes overwhelmingly, rendering transgender issues unignorable in today's divisive political climate.

BARBARA JOHNSON,
BROADWAY WORLD

Trans playwrights are still emerging, which puts Deen’s show in the vanguard here ... DRAW THE CIRCLE does not sugarcoat his despair or incidents of violence, yet it rather amazingly reaches back to retrieve people who easily could have been cut out for life. The wrathful moment confronting us with the ongoing violence against trans people does not define the tone of this personable, entirely approachable show. Inarguably, though, it’s that flicker of wrath that gives the piece its purpose.

NELSON PRESSLEY,
WASHINGTON POST

[In DRAW THE CIRCLE,] we watch as Deen examines himself from afar, trapped in a moment of fear and vulnerability — a moment of self-exposure so raw and naked it took me aback. At a time when the words queer, trans, and Muslim automatically elicit a series of assumptions, racist stereotypes, and preordained narratives, Deen has managed to pull off a feat that is expansive and nuanced, one that encompasses many (sometimes contravening) truths and realities without sacrificing a sense of emotional wholeness and generosity.

AVIVA STAHL,
THE VILLAGE VOICE