Sunday Reset
The Blue Room Theatre
Wednesday, October 22 2025
Local team Tempest Productions and playwright Medina Dizdarevic brought their latest creation, Sunday Reset, to The Blue Room this October. A contemplation on grief, depression, and the immutable bonds between best friends, the piece packed a tremendous amount of material into its sixty-minute runtime.
The audience was introduced to Zara (Amanda Watson), who had barely left her room the last two weeks. The state of her bedroom was somewhat untidy, though not terribly so, while the character vacillated between hyperactivity and fugue state. Bombarded with social media notifications and stream-of-consciousness voice messages from her best friend, Sofia (Jude Soussan), Zara retreated to her bed and began snacking.
Soon enough, Sofia arrived, and the causes of Zara’s distress were laid bare. A relationship breakup was the most recent symptom, with her messages to the ex-partner left unread. Going deeper loomed an amorphous but distinctly unhealthy family dynamic, all the way through to Zara’s inner core, a numb exhaustion with most everything and everyone, including at various points Sofia themselves.
Within five minutes of meeting the characters, they became fully actualised real people that the viewers invested in. Sofia was loud, extroverted, brash, and solved problems by running from them, whilst Zara was withdrawn and mostly reserved, yet juggled multiple responsibilities with minimal complaint and a certain aplomb. How the two had ever become friends could almost have been a separate story all in itself.
At times, the staging grew more surreal and dreamlike, as the two friends appeared to share the same hallucinations. The given timeframe of the piece was a singular Sunday afternoon—however, there was also a sense of trapped existentialism that could have gone on far longer, impatiently awaiting its resolution.
The lived-in feel of the dialogue Watson and Soussan shared, and the ease between the two in their interactions, made their characters’ relationship all the more authentic. The actors fully inhabited their roles, as thoroughly with their body language as the written script itself.
The emotional crescendo of the evening was a speech by Watson, almost a soliloquy, in hauntingly detailed metaphor, in which she described how depression and self-doubt felt from the inside. To acknowledge the issues directly in this way, their power over her character began to ebb, and a sense of catharsis was attained.
Near enough a 2000s period piece if not for the ubiquitous smartphones, Sunday Reset was a well-constructed, well-told performance that dealt with relatable, universal topics, which at points veered into metaphorical unreality. A quality tale brought forward by an assured and talented team, one can confidently anticipate their next project, whenever that may be.