By Shawn Maus
Most people don’t live inside one box. We move between them.
The box marked family. One marked grief. The box marked things I need to tell my mother but would rather drive another 200 miles first.
Emily Turner understands that. Her Little Boxes, presented as part of Cincinnati LAB Theatre’s 2026 New Works Festival, is made up of four connected short plays. Each can stand on its own. Together, they become a funny and moving look at the relationships we inherit, choose and keep trying to repair.
That flexibility is one of the play’s strengths. A theatre could present the full evening or choose one piece for a short-play festival without making it feel incomplete. The characters connect, but each story carries its own weight.
The program describes the play as four interconnected vignettes about the boxes people find themselves in, struggle to escape and sometimes discover contain unexpected gifts.
The individual pieces did not have titles, so the names below are my own. Every box needs a label, right?
The Dog Behind the Couch
In The Dog, a newly single man tries to coax his newly adopted dog from behind the couch.
He reads from the shelter’s instructions on helping a frightened animal adjust to a new home. Before long, it becomes clear the dog is not the only one trying to understand what happened to his old life.
Mead Ryder brings the monologue to life with warmth and humor, slowly revealing that the man and the dog may be adjusting to more than a new home. He never asks us to feel sorry for the man. He lets the loneliness slip out between the jokes, half-finished thoughts and explanations offered to an animal that may or may not be listening.
This piece set the tone for the evening: funny enough to keep us relaxed and honest enough to catch us off guard.
Sisters Know Exactly Where to Poke
Procaccino introduces the second piece with Sisters from White Christmas, which earns a laugh before anyone says a word.
The four sisters quickly take over from there.
Jayley Sams gives Abby a funny mix of desperation and fear as she tries to create a perfect family moment. Rachel Handkins makes Laura’s need to organize everybody else’s life both hilarious and believable. Mary Hartman’s Nancy says what everyone else is thinking—and what only a sister would dare say out loud.
Emma Kist brings enormous presence, comic timing and joy to Kate. Kist, who is Deaf and has spent years interpreting theatre in American Sign Language, reacts with such precision that Kate remains part of every shift in the room.
It was also good to see a production make room for an actor with a disability without treating her presence as the point. Kist is there because she is an actor with something to bring to the role. She brings plenty.
The scene works because the rivalry is real, but so is the love.
Mother Knows Best, Just Ask Her
Road Trip with Ma places Roberta and her son Zak inside the particular pressure cooker of a long car ride with your mother.
Zak wants to announce his engagement. Roberta has thoughts. Of course she does.
Linda Callahan takes the familiar Jewish-mother character and gives her fresh style, bite and empathy. Roberta is funny because we recognize her, but Callahan also lets us see what sits underneath the questions and complaints: the fear that her son is moving into a life where she will matter less.
Mead Ryder shows another side of his talent as Zak, the son who has been down this road before and knows every turn.
Ryder’s face does half the work. You always know what Zak wants to say, even when he keeps it to himself.
Their conflict works because both of them want the same thing. They want to stay close. They just have very different ideas about what that should look like.
The Paperwork is the Easy Part in Forms
In Forms, Charlotte and James face the mountain of questions, training materials and personal records required to adopt a child.
The forms are frustrating. What the process makes them say out loud is harder.
Rachel Handkins shifts completely from Laura’s confidence in Sisters to Charlotte’s fear and hurt. Charlotte is being asked to prove she is ready to become a mother while carrying the private fear that her own body has already told her no. Handkins lets us feel how badly Charlotte wants this without turning the moment into a speech about pain.
Ryder again changes gears as James, the future father trying to help, reassure and answer questions that may not have good answers.
Adoption asks Charlotte and James to explain why they want to be parents in ways most couples never have to put into writing. Turner doesn’t argue with the process. She shows how painful those questions can be when you already want a child this badly.
The Hand Guiding the Boxes
Gregory Procaccino’s direction is one of the evening’s strongest assets.
Procaccino has been part of Cincinnati theatre for decades, and that experience shows. He knows when to keep things moving and when to get out of the actors’ way.
This was a workshop production, but the staging never felt careless. Procaccino keeps the focus where it belongs: on the people.
That sounds simple. It rarely is.
Emily Turner Knows These People
Turner writes with a sharp comic instinct and a strong understanding of why people behave the way they do. Her characters usually avoid saying what they really need to say. They organize Christmas decorations. Criticize a fiancée. Complain about paperwork. Talk to a dog.
Then the truth works its way out.
That is why the audience connected so strongly with these pieces. During the talkback, people kept saying they knew this sister, this mother, this couple or this situation. And everybody, it seemed, knew a Liam. They were recognizing people in their own lives. That is the play’s real strength.
One of the Festival’s Best
Little Boxes was one of the strongest offerings in this year’s New Works Festival.
It made the audience laugh, then quietly reminded us of the people in our own lives. There was no need for a villain or a grand speech. It simply placed people inside relationships they could not easily leave and watched what happened.
Cincinnati LAB Theatre deserves praise for continuing to give playwrights, directors and actors a place to test new work in front of an audience. Its workshop model treats the audience as part of the process rather than someone arriving after every decision has been made. New plays need that kind of room and Cincinnati LAB Theatre keeps providing it.
Shawn Says: Little Boxes finds the funny, frightened people inside the labels we place on our lives. Emily Turner’s script, Gregory Procaccino’s direction and a deeply invested cast made this one of the festival’s best evenings.
It was a fitting final show for Cincinnati LAB Theatre’s New Works Festival: funny, generous and full of people we recognized.
Submissions open for next year’s festival on August 1. Get more information HERE.
