What Readers Are Saying

"This is an ambitious piece, and it's clear a great deal of research went into it."

This is an ambitious piece, and it's clear a great deal of research went into it, the Wilde scholarship alone (the In the Forest recitation, the Personal Impressions of America lecture, the Bram Stoker/Florence Balcombe love triangle, Fr. Daniel Lord's deathbed account) is impressively deep, and it gives the two-hander real intellectual weight. The "quiz" structure of Scene 1, where Aiden tests Andrew's Wilde knowledge, is a smart way to establish stakes and chemistry without resorting to exposition dumps.

My biggest note is density. Right now nearly every other line is a Wilde epigram or a piece of biography, and the play sometimes reads more like an annotated anthology than a drama. I found myself wanting more scenes of silence, of the two men simply being rather than quoting. The device works best when it's load-bearing (Aiden's "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken" landing right after the story about his grandmother is genuinely moving), and weakest when it's decorative. I'd cut roughly a third of the quotes and let the remaining ones breathe.

Structurally, the play-within-a-play device (the "Wilde, Wit and Wisdom" musical Aiden is composing) is a strong choice, it externalizes his psychology and gives you room for spectacle, but the transitions in and out of it need clearer staging logic; right now they rely heavily on a stage direction rather than a dramatic turn.

Andrew's "secret," which the piece keeps promising, needs to land with more specificity and earlier stakes, right now it resolves more as thematic revelation than plot. Consider what Andrew risks, concretely, by the end.

This has real potential for LGBTQ+ and Catholic theatre festivals alike. Trim it, sharpen the mystery, and it's very producible.

"I devoured this in one sitting and honestly got a little emotional by the end."

I devoured this in one sitting and honestly got a little emotional by the end. Aiden is a fantastic character, the walking stick, the sunflower, the "mon coeur," the sheer campy bravado of him, he's funny in that specific way where you can tell the humor is armor.

The scene where he finally tells Andrew about his father making him kneel and beg to be "normal," right after all that flirty banter, hit like a gut punch. That contrast is the best thing in the script.

I also loved that this isn't a coming-out story or a tragedy, it's about a queer man deciding whether to let faith and family back in on his own terms, which feels rare and welcome. The ending, with the callback to Ireland being the first country to legalize gay marriage by popular vote, made me tear up a little. It reframes the whole play as reclamation rather than just romance.

Aiden's "camp" register is so consistent that I wanted a scene where it cracks completely, not just the Maime story, but a moment where he can't perform at all. I also wanted a little more interiority from Andrew earlier on.

The deathbed sequence (Scene 7) is a wild, theatrical swing, the tomb, the lipstick, the kiss, and I think it'll either bring the house down or lose some of the audience depending entirely on tone/direction. Worth workshopping live before locking it.

"A rare script that treats both queerness and Catholic faith as worthy of real thought."

I want to say upfront that I went into this expecting to feel either preached at or alienated, and instead I found it unexpectedly generous to both sides. Andrew is written with real care, his line "It's what made me want to be a priest... to unconditional love" doesn't feel like a talking point, it feels like a man's actual vocation.

And the play doesn't let him off easy either; Aiden's challenges (the despot quote about the Pope, the line about "who's holding the pen") are sharp and the script lets them stand without a tidy rebuttal.

I appreciated that the play uses real, current Church teaching, Fiducia Supplicans, Pope Francis's comments on homosexuality being decriminalized, rather than a strawman version of Catholicism. That grounding gave the theological conversations weight instead of feeling like a debate club exercise.

Where I'd ask for more: the "holy homosexual" line near the end is a beautiful, loaded idea, and I don't think the play has fully earned it yet dramatically. It arrives almost as a thesis statement rather than something we've watched Andrew discover through the story.

Overall: a rare script that treats both queerness and Catholic faith as worthy of real thought rather than caricature. That's genuinely hard to do, and this mostly does it.

"I got pulled in fast and would absolutely go see this performed."

Okay, I'll admit the setup, two guys quizzing each other about Oscar Wilde trivia in a library, did not sound like something I'd normally pick up, but I got pulled in fast.

Aiden's voice is just really fun to read, "Quelle Surpreeese! Ooo lala Faboo!" made me laugh out loud, and the whole vibe of him being extra and a little ridiculous but clearly hiding something sadder made me want to keep going.

I liked that it's basically a love story, a mystery, and a history lesson at once, even if I'll admit some of the Wilde quotes went over my head.

The absinthe scene and the "Hot Priest" title made me laugh, very self-aware, and the family stuff with Aiden's grandmother genuinely got to me. I did not expect to care this much about a fictional grandma named Maime.

The ending felt a little rushed to me. After all that build-up about Andrew's "secret" and the mystery he's solving, I wanted a slightly bigger, clearer payoff before it moved into the goodbye/hug/kiss, blown across the stage ending.

Bottom line: I'd absolutely go see this performed. I think the songs and the deathbed number in particular would be a blast live, but on the page, a few of the quote-heavy stretches could be trimmed so the relationship stays front and center.