Rev celebrates the tradition of the fighting middle class wanting more for its future generations. The play demonstrates the fortitude, strength, and vulnerability of the American woman. The dream all Americans have for future generations to do better than the last. This play will explore how women contribute to the legacy of their families, break tradition, and help carve the landscape of America’s hometowns and their own family history.

Rev is a love letter to my childhood home on the Southwest Side of Chicago: West Lawn. This play is dedicated to all the people and places that shaped me into the woman I am today. This play is for my mother, father, and brother. It is for my best friend who lived three houses down from me while we were experiencing our own “Emily-like” moments in life. It is for 64th Street and ambling down Lawndale in my blue and gold uniform on my way to St. Nicholas of Tolentine Elementary School. The play is full of memories, like riding the #54 CTA bus up and down Pulaski and the first time I road the Orange Line by myself, looked out the window after the train passed Halsted, and watched the Chicago skyline come into view.

West Lawn is a residential neighborhood in Chicago that is full of generations of families. It is a community of middle, working-class people that help each other when their paychecks can’t quite cut it. We shovel each other’s walkways. We pass delicious barbeque across fences. We work out of garages fixing everything we own by hand and trade goods with each other in our alleys to help our neighbor get the job done.

West Lawn is home to numerous cultures and ethnicities. Businesses like Gibson and Sons Automotive Repair shop must reflect the West Lawn community. It is required that any production of Rev must showcase the diversity of West Lawn and show respect and gratitude for each character's hard work and sacrifice.

Despite the play’s opening description of a car garage full of car parts, work tables, and clutter, I always keep a black box theatre in mind. The garage, along with the Chevy Camaro, can be as grand or as minimal as the theatre’s space and budget allow. Let your designers step up to the challenge and trust in your audiences’ imagination.

There are moments of silence, beats, and pauses throughout the play. Those are not suggestions. The pace of the dialogue is brisk. Each character has work to get done and places to be; none of them have time to sugar coat or dally. Especially in the scenes between Camaro and Aston, who can already predict the next words out of each others’ mouths. When a silence, a pause, or beat hits, the audience should feel it too. Sometimes the silence will feel like a breath of fresh air as we travel down a memory. Other times, it will feel like a punch in the gut.

The core of my mission as a playwright is to explore the many facets of womanhood. In many instances, to be a woman means pain, silence, humiliation, and loneliness. However, being a woman can also mean strength, endurance, vulnerability, and love. I feel that often women writers are influenced or pressured into believing that their stories only matter when their characters endure some kind of extreme trauma. That trauma is usually translated into a rape, assault, harassment, or putting her literal life on the line. I wrote Rev to prove that is not true. I do not need to inflict violence on a woman’s body to assert the importance of her life and goal. There is value in stories about women living paycheck to paycheck, women trying to raise a family, women going for a promotion, women and female friendships, women falling in and out of love, women fucking up and learning (or not) from their mistakes, and women finding themselves in the pages of their family history. There is value in a woman’s smile (not just her tears) as she looks at her accomplishments, flaws, and this thing she calls life.

by Rachel Bykowski