With the craft and depth of a fine novelist, Mr Belber creates a mosaic of pointed incidents imparting vital information. Beautifully dramatized is the subtext of enduring the damage by a troubled family background, as evidenced by Joan’s circuitous life journey with its bouts of self-sabotage, irrational decisions, selfishness and redemptive self-awareness. The form of the memory play is taken to the zenith by JOAN.

Theatre Scene

With bold ambition to do just that, to tell the story of one woman’s life with honesty and integrity, playwright Stephen Belber’s JOAN offers a kaleidoscopic look at its fictional, titular character through a lens of sweeping longitude that slowly creates an absorbing and dramatically effective portrait. The humanity painted by Mr Belber’s play is moving precisely because of its simplicity and ordinariness. Every person has a story. Joan’s is worth seeing.

Stage Left

In many ways, Joan has led a normal existence: daughter and mother, lover and wife, sister and friend, artist and teacher. She has had affairs and heartaches, hopes and frustrations. What’s less ordinary is how the playwright Stephen Belber tells her story: in nonchronological vignettes that jump around various points in her life. …JOAN is a fractured portrait that holds together.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, The New Yorker