John Brown asks Harriet Tubman to fight with him to stop slavery. Her traumatic epilepsy triggered, Tubman moves through time to a modern Philadelphia prison. She meets Nelson Davis, who falls in love with her. He detains her from Harper’s Ferry; Furious, she returns to her time to mourn the failed raid. But when she’s recruited to lead the Union Army’s Combahee River Raid, she returns to the prison to recruit her spies. Davis goes back in time separately to fight Confederates and TB—and become her second husband.
Genre: Political
The Heart Sellers
Jane and Luna run into each other in the grocery store on Thanksgiving in 1973 and discover they have much in common: they’re both 23, recent Asian immigrants, homesick and lonely with hardworking absentee husbands, and adjusting to a new country surprisingly filled with as much political uncertainty as the places they’ve left. Over a bottle of wine (or two) and a questionable frozen turkey, they dream of Disneyland, learning to drive, and an unknowable future as they share their hopes and fears in making a new home in a new reality.
An Eloquent Fugitive Slave Flees to Ireland
Inspired by his 1845 trip to Ireland. AN ELOQUENT FUGITIVE SLAVE FLEES TO IRELAND is a fictionized account of Frederick Douglass’ voyage across the Atlantic Ocean on the steamship Cambria. Exploring themes of racism, sexism, and freedom, AN ELOQUENT FUGITIVE SLAVE FLEES TO IRELAND uses dialogue sprinkled with rap to give enhanced contemporary resonance to a largely unknown page of Frederick Douglass’ life.
The Broken Machine
In this climate-chaos comic-tragedy, a burnt-out coder has become a hermit in the wilderness, nursing a broken arm and making lists from memory—of endangered species, moments of Lost Time, Incorrect States of Mind—in company with her only friend, a gray fox with a bad attitude. When wildfires approach, they flee through the wilderness to the sea, pursued by feckless would-be rescuers and threatened by a punk psychopomp.
Warsaw
72 year-old Krystyna fights for life in a hospital as four people wait and reveal the reasons why her survival is vital to them. Rachel is a driven young doctor whose brother Jonathan died in the Trade Center; financier David is Rachel’s adoring ex-fiancé, rejected in the fall-out from Jonathan’s death; Nicolas is the truck-driver who, distracted, wrecked Krystyna’s car; and Klaus is a hospital volunteer who believes Krystyna is someone he loved long ago in Poland. But even if she survives, is it too late for love? What purpose or meaning remains for any of them? Will Krystyna have their answers?
Zombie: The American
ZOMBIE: THE AMERICAN is a cross between Jacobean tragedy and Dr. Strangelove, a futuristic political satire set in the year 2063. Thom Valentine, the first openly-gay President of the United States, faces a host of problems: an imminent civil war, the threat of an African invasion, an adulterous First Gentleman, and zombies in the basement of the White House! With his power, his marriage, and the nation’s well-being at stake, he must decide what he cares most about saving … and at what cost.
The Vagrant Trilogy
THE VAGRANT TRILOGY consists of three plays: The Hour of Feeling, The Vagrant, and Urge for Going. Each play can be performed individually, or together as the trilogy.
In part one, The Hour of Feeling, (1967) we meet Adham, a hot young scholar back from university in Cairo, readying himself to go to London to give a talk. He marries a girl from the village and takes her with him, and when war breaks out at home, the two near-strangers must decide what to do. The second play in the trilogy, The Vagrant, finds Adham and Abir nearly 20 years later (1982), divorced, him teaching at a humble college in London. Adham’s hopes for professorship are tested when both “homes”—England and Palestine—flare up with political violence, and the compartmentalization he’s built around himself in order to survive starts to crumble. The third play, Urge for Going, finds a completely different Adham and Abir, representing a different fork in the road taken back in 1967. We see them in a modern-day refugee camp in Lebanon, with a daughter (Jamila) determined to break out of the endless stasis of her family’s life.
Uncle Vanya
An elderly professor and his glamorous, younger second wife, Yeléna, return to the rural estate that supports their urban lifestyle. Ványa, brother of the professor’s late first wife, who manages the estate, and Ástrov, the local doctor, fall under Yeléna’s spell, while bemoaning their provincial existence. Sónya, the professor’s daughter by his first wife, who works with Ványa, suffers from unrequited feelings for Ástrov. Matters come to a crisis when the professor announces he plans to sell the estate, Ványa and Sónya’s home, to make more money for himself and his wife.
Two Degrees
Emma Phelps is a paleoclimatologist, focusing on ice in Greenland. In drilling and studying ice core samples, she sees first hand the symptoms of our changing planet, which makes the need to act all the more crucial and urgent. In addition, Emma, as a recent widow, experiences grief that compounds itself with each passing month. Now she’s been asked to testify in Washington D.C. in a senate committee regarding climate change legislation, and in this intersection of science and politics, of politics and the personal, she finds more than just a little is breaking up under the strain of change.
17 Minutes
17 MINUTES is the length of time Sheriff’s Deputy Andy Rubens stood outside of a school while a shooter was inside. The play 17 MINUTES explores the communal and residual effects of a shooting through Andy, a man who struggles with his own complicity in the tragedy, and who seeks meaning in the wake of the shooting.