Press

“Lydia Stryk’s compelling An Accident is a fictionalized account of the recovery process the playwright herself went through after an accident, but it’s equally the drama of something Stryk was denied — coming to terms with the man who hit her…. The sharply defined stages of her progress occur within the context of their wary, forthright, prickly, warm, confrontational and erotically charged interactions. The degree to which the character makes us feel her physical struggle in our own bodies makes her sinuous progress our triumph, too.”
— Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle

“Introspective at times, and often seething with cynical humor, An Accident is uncompromisingly human … The play takes us on a roller-coaster of emotion. … It’s all here: guilt, sorrow, remorse, fear, shame, longing, desire … Its truth cannot be denied. It’s powerful and riveting theater.”
— Clinton Stark, Stark Insider

“Lydia Stryk’s play is a pounding two-person drama with utterly compelling pile drivers of empathy for the characters and surprisingly good humor.”
— Albert Goodwin San Francisco Examiner

“An Accident will keep you at the edge of your seat. …It’s an emotional surprise.“
— Jerry Friedman, KGO Radio

“An Accident has a harrowing sense of truth that is hard to shake. With her stark, poetic language, Stryk captures the frailty of life and the omnipresence of mortality in everyday activities.”
— Karen D’Souza San Jose Mercury News

“One of the most intense pieces you could possibly see.”
— MiamiArtZine

“The play is an emotional testament to the power of dialogue. The hospital bed is the focal point of scenes, charged in erotic revelation…. The audience is entranced and impressed at such brutally honest moments. There are instances of wit to temper the emotion, as the multi-layered implications of guilt, disaster and disability are explored by the two, sometimes to unexpectedly hilarious effect. Their shared accident puts all of life on hold for this unlikely pair. And the audience feels that way too.”
— Gerard Stanley Hornby, Pittsburgh City Paper

“An Accident explores a most unpoetic matter — a human body run over by a car — but does so with intense, careful poetry. At the end, we know we have found not revenge, not romance, but grace.“
— Theatre Ghost LA

“Of the two strangers we meet in a hospital room, in this compulsively watchable and traumatic play by the American writer Lydia Stryk, one would “give everything,” as she says, to lift even one hand…
For big babies like me, just the sight of a hospital bed on a stage is enough to make me flinch, or dread some chin-up type chronicle of pluck. But An Accident isn’t either. In Trevor Schmidt’s production the notion of recovery — of body, of memory, of moral equilibrium — is a rather delicate and resonating question. You can’t not look at an accident, they say. Exactly.
It happens under an inspired design element (Schmidt himself is the designer), an elegant overhead lighting installation that reinvents the deadening institutional fluorescent fixture as a thing of beauty — a serpent anatomized as a spine slatted with vertebrae and demarcated with red twinkling lights. And the Northern Light Theatre season finale is graced, too, by unusual heft in casting. Two seasoned pros, Melissa Thingelstad and Michael Peng, create a dynamic of (very) unexpected complexity. As Libby, Thingelstad delivers a performance of remarkable nuance, detail and lustre, conveying by voice and eyes alone an intricate and shifting mixture of fear, panic, simmering rage, an appreciation of absurdity, and something very like curiosity, however unwilling, about the mysterious persistence of her sole visitor. She makes us feel the physical struggle built into defying the body and reanimating it. And it’s a measure of the character’s strong will, as Thingelstad conjures, that gallows humour colours prickliness. It seems odd to use the word fun under the circumstances, but she’s fun to watch.
You wouldn’t say that of Peng’s abject Anton. He’s a flinch on legs. His keynote, conveyed emphatically by the actor, is intense guilt. He’s abased by it, horrified by it, terrified and beaten into submission by it, over and over. It’s only as the play proceeds, along with Libby’s progress and the characters’ serial encounters, that we discover layers under this surface. Why is he here? In his way Anton is attempting to fix his own damaged life: healing by presence. He’s a history teacher, whose specialty is Civil War battles. Those gory battlefields are, to say the least, an improbably extravagant metaphor for struggles in a hospital room. But you’ll be surprised by the way it flowers late in the play.
Recovery is its own drama, of course: some things are recoverable in life, some not. Creating drama from discovery is a more ticklish business. In its way, An Accident defies your expectations by offering an adventure into the unknown where the damages are random and the outcomes, both for perpetrator and victim, are uncertain.“
— Liz Nicholls, Edmonton Journal

“When I returned from whatever place Northern Light Theatre’s An Accident had taken me, the first image that came to mind was “human tsunami”, massive instant physical devastation … followed by wave after wave of emotional carnage, numbed people holding on to anything available to avoid being swept away.
A catastrophic event can be reduced to manageable terms, statistics in a report, notes on a medical chart, but the experience is indescribable outside of the accounts of those on the ground at the time. It’s why strangers meet at accident sites to erect roadside memorials, or how war veterans can sit together and calmly discuss a horrendous battle they were each part of. The need for understanding and closure overrides all other concerns.
So it is with Michael Peng’s guilt-stricken, downward spiralling Anton, who arrives at the hospital bed of Melissa Thingelstad’s Libby. As is sometimes the case when one or more of the senses is diminished, another compensates, and while her body is paralyzed Libby’s heightened mind is firing on all cylinders, and Anton will not be awarded absolution easily, if at all. Accounts must be settled. Libby’s telescopic focus holds a magnifying glass over Anton, withering under the heat of her scalpel-sharp inquisition. Truths are revealed and characters are shaded as their psyches begin to surface and fight to oppose this one tragic moment from dominating their entire lives. It’s not a clean fight or a fair one, and it leads to a boundary-smashing moment that is simultaneously a treacherous headstand on the very edge of the abyss and the most natural thing in the world to have happened.
For a dialogue-driven play centering around immobility, it ironically processes through you much in the same fashion as a movement piece does, drawn from the players through the antenna that is the massive spinal column hovering over both set and story and transmitted directly to the bodies of the audience.
Peng and Thingelstad’s performances are sterling (remember that word), where training and process relax comfortably in the back seat as artistry takes the wheel and fearlessly hits the open road. Lydia Stryk’s script, lean, clean, layered with gallows humor amid the pain and recrimination and devoid of ersatz sentiment, is an actors’ dream, life as a battle of inches, second-to-second, where damage is sudden and indiscriminate, and surprisingly, the same for healing and recovery.
Every single element of this production melded together beautifully, from its echoey first moments to the wistful final grace notes of music that hearkens back to the great MTM television dramas, reverberating through the hallways of what could easily be St. Eligius itself.
This is where Trevor Schmidt and NLT excel, running a wire up the vena cava and non-judgementally scoping out the darker chambers of the heart in shows that stay with you long after they close. I’m travelling three hours each way to see it again, and it’s my pleasure.“
— afta the lafta

“One random incident.  The culmination of a thousand thousand such.  Such makes up our lives, for good and ill and all things in between.  Is there meaning there? …  Or do we create meaning? Does that even matter?
An Accident is the second show I have reviewed by the Griot Theatre, and hopefully will prove nowhere near the last.  Both times I’ve felt deeply moved, as well as startled by the vision presented.
Soon enough, we begin to meet the characters.  Libby (Kacie Rogers) wakes up after a terrible accident. She was hit by a car then run over. She cannot move. Her arms and legs will not obey. For the moment she is broken. Perhaps forever.  As we meet her, we see the powerful will and imagination she clearly possesses, and courage as she strives to remember anything, even her name.
Next we meet Anton (Kent Faulcon), the history teacher who ran her over.  A somewhat timid man, and a far from bad one.  No one knows who “Libby” might be.  No one has come forward.  She has no visitors.  Well, no one but Anton, who feels a need. The police do say this was an accident. No one’s fault. Anton and Libby both accept this, intellectually. They struggle mightily with feeling it.
Here is much of what gives this play its impact, the deeply personal struggle of both to live with and process what has happened and is happening. In fact both have the same goal, healing. Both always want Libby to walk again, to regain her memories, her former life whatever that may be. Along the way we get little if any sentimentality. Libby comes across as an interesting person, a remarkable one. But hardly a kind of beautific saint or martyr.  She’s angry!  Sometimes. She can be petty, terrified, sublime, cruel, childish, enraged, sarcastic — all within a few minutes. Trauma doesn’t mold one into a plastic shape of an angel. 
Instead she remains wonderfully, frustratingly human — as does her opposite number, who needs some healing of his own. A good man, but again in no way some caricature of what some say humans should be.
No, like Libby, Anton remains a person we recognize, to whom we listen and can understand, such understanding helping us see ourselves.
That captures the dynamic of the play.
I don’t usually care for plays that seek to answer questions. They all too often become rather crude polemics. An Accident avoids this trap by exploring a question rather than simply answering it.  That question “How do we heal?” of course has many answers, and the play shows us a few — not formulae, not pat stereotypes urging us to shut part of ourselves off, not thoughtless truisms.  Rather shows us two people healing. And in touching our hearts maybe helps us heal a bit too, from the individual aches we all endure, whatever the details. I left the theatre very touched, very moved, and very impressed.“
— Zahir Blue

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