JOYCE VAN DYKE
Playwright

“The Oil Thief [is] an eloquently written new play about the intimidating passage of time in both the earth’s life and our own individual ones…All of the human drama is crystalline in The Oil Thief…Amy [is] a middle-aged hot-shot geologist superbly played by Melinda Lopez as a woman whose mining of an ancient elixir has made her acutely aware of both her guilt in its Third-World exploitive acquisition, and her mortality.”

—Boston Phoenix

 

“Somehow, Joyce Van Dyke fits not just a love triangle but 450 million years of geological time into a taut, mesmerizing 80 minutes.”

—Boston Globe Critics’ Picks

 

“There’s a whole emotional terrain Amy has yet to explore within herself, holding who knows what reservoirs of possibility. The play handles Amy’s burning need to explore herself, Rex’s feelings of abandonment…and Aleksi’s youthful flights of passion with delicacy, and finds unexpected ways to tie Amy’s emotional journey into the question of oil: how it enriches entrenched wealth, inflicts even greater suffering on the poor, and has led the global economy into a blazing, short-lived love affair with, as Amy says, ‘something we can’t have.“”

—Edge Boston