Reviewed by Tracey Paleo, Gia On The Move

Women live in horror. And none more so than those of us living in the present. It’s a shocking and broad statement. But true … sometimes. We are the eyes that are looking at the past and realizing that although much has changed about our surface environments, issues have been raised and finally spoken about and mildly dealt with, our deepest fears are ever present. And the truth of that can be devastating, even in the gloss.

By The Light of the Moon, might be one of the hardest hitting examples of the kind of historical injustice suffered by females that everyone has done their best to ignore. Painfully present in every moment, performer and writer Shea Donovan perfectly takes us through the mind bend of Lila, a young British woman forced into an asylum for the criminally insane in 1928 and abandoned by her own family for being ‘wicked’. Or at least she thinks so. Until she finally works out in her mind all of the details that she’s blacked out decades later, of just how she’s been irreversibly wronged, and her life taken away by a crime that was committed upon HER.

Deeply moving. At 30 minutes, Donovan is absolutely captivating through the innocence of silly poems, chores and intimate conversations as Lily moves through the dark alleys of her own mind.

Very Highly Recommended

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