Overview
Been unemployed too long? Welcome to a very special office of the Unemployment Bureau! Here you will work with two very special unemployment counselors to place you into a job today. It may not be a job you are qualified to do, or a job that’s safe for anyone to do, but you will have to do it. Because if you can walk, you can work!
The play also concerns domestic terrorism, strippers, and weaponized hummingbirds.
Casting & Production
Casting
ONE — Any age, race, gender. Single.
TWO — Any age, race, gender. Not single.
Casting Note
Both parts can be played by any two actors or any age, race or gender. The play does work better when at least two of the elements are different, and it is an opportunity to cast more diversely.
Setting
TIME
A possible future in which if you are unemployed too long, you are sent to a special room at the unemployment office where you are assigned a job.
PLACES
1. A special room of an unemployment office. Full of stacks of files, carts of files, as if computers and automatization has been ignored and documentation and paper back-ups used as a way to create more jobs. Two chairs face the audience with two large identical stacks of files on each side. As the play progresses, the files they deal with should move to indicate the passage of time.
2. In front of “End of Day Recording Devices”, where each of them must record their out of work activities and scan all receipts per regulation 14-275 of the civil service code. We don’t necessarily need to see these machines, but hear the beeps as each item is scanned.
3. An interrogation room.
Reviews
“THE HUMMINGBIRDS pulls you in and refuses to let you go until the very end, the hallmark of powerful writing. It is a dark ride through a twisted, haunted future. It does not ask to be seen; it insists—forcefully—on being seen.”
—Out in Jersey
“Somehow, not unexpectedly, the dystopia in question is not exactly a futuristic vision far removed from the present. THE HUMMINGBIRDS is a watermark of a show, which replaces the rhythm of everyday life with a different one, a few notes lower and with a unique power.”
—The Cultural Observer
