KAREN SUNDE

THE TIMES London
"...the power of BALLOON is its density. ...magnificence...poignancy... (like) being overwhelmed (by) a giant jigsaw puzzle, then relishing its finished design."

THE RECORD
[BALLOON is] "absolutely first-rate...serious, intelligent, challenging, a play that's humane in its concerns, vividly theatrical, and gracefully written with one sharp epigram after another. ...full-blooded drama, layered with meaning. ...a play about the shapes of lives and the fates of nations."

WOMEN'S WEAR DAILY NYC
"..intriguing...arresting ideas... BALLOON is full of an engaging playfulness, an admirable seriousness."

VILLAGER (Greenwich Village, NYC)
"(Sunde) converts our text book history into flesh and blood passions... People achieving greatly, now and then crippled by arrogance and intolerance, suffering mightily, dazzled by possibilities, devastated by disappointments yet continuing and surviving are what she dramatizes."

RICHARD DYSART
"The extremely high quality...is apparent throughout - it bubbles with crisp language, depth, and humor. Your 'actor's ear' serves you so truthfully and consistently. So rich... And thus so rare. Coming to the BALLOON for the third time just now leaves me in awe... Truly."

CONTEMPORARY DRAMATISTS London
from "SUNDE" entry

"With a voice both poetic and theatrical, she dramatizes historical epochs in epic scope, making hers a distinctive, even unique, contemporary American drama, more akin to European than to other American plays. She tackles topics of war and politics to produce usually presentational, often explosive theatre... No matter how sweeping the setting and cast, she chooses personal canvases upon which to paint her funny, thrilling, searing, moving scenes.

... The huge canvas and varied vistas of THE RUNNING OF THE DEER [LIBERTY] and the more personal dialectic of BALLOON (as Ben Franklin, in a theatrical framework worthy of Jean Genet, spars with his Tory son and his French mistress) probe the stuff of which our heroes - and by extension we ourselves - are made. In inquiring about our past, Sunde remarks upon our future. That she does so with a sure histrionic sense is a guarantee that her work will endure in the American theatre after our more commercial fare has proven ephemeral."