WHEN LIGHTING THE VOIDS by JON BERNSON
The dangers of working in the voids on massive ships are well known but often ignored by the titans of industry, the government, and even the workers themselves. An investigation into the causes of a tragic explosion at a Gulf Coast shipyard in 2009 revealed how blatant and systematic the disregard for human life can be.
Constructed as a mystery and culled from interviews with OSHA investigators, shipyard workers and family members of the deceased, the play unravels the story of what happened and reveals the human trauma inflicted by the accident. It also underscores the determination of those still seeking justice to this day.
When Lighting The Voids is a commission by StoryWorks: a documentary theater project from the Center for Investigative Reporting which experiments with new approaches to the portrayal of factual events.
COLONIALISM IS TERRIBLE BUT PHO IS DELICIOUS by DUSTIN CHINN
Our starter takes place in 19th-century French Indochina, where a native finds herself in the kitchen of a colonial aristocrat. The second serving finds us in 1990’s Ho Chi Minh city as two Americans make first contact with the local breakfast. And for dessert, the charms of gentrifying modern-day Brooklyn.
A three-course tasting menu of the tension that simmers between authorship and ownership across food culture, told across the history of Vietnamese noodle soup.
SUSPENSION by KRISTIANA RAE COLÓN
For the students of Climb & Succeed Charter Academy, a high school in a dystopian near future, the slightest defiance is met with riot-gear-clad security who patrol the halls informed by an AI bot. Armed and ready with each student’s protocols, she deploys harrowing new disciplinary codes that take ‘in-school suspension’ (ISS) to a haunting extreme. In search of their mysteriously missing sister and guided by a mystic teaching artist, Voltaire & Yansa learn to wield their ancestral magic and black girl badassery to combat the harrowing militarization of public education.
THE DAUGHTERS by PATRICIA COTTER
A gutsy comedic romp over 60 years, from the first secret meeting of the first lesbian social club in San Francisco to closing night of the last lesbian bar. As women loving women gather in defiance of convention (and the law), they drink, debate, politicize, flirt, drink more, dance hard, makeout, fall in love, break up—and though they are entirely unaware—make history and change the world. A play about the transformation of identity, gender, and sexuality across generations in the queer epi-center of the universe.
VRTU-L by T.D. MITCHELL
For the modern warrior it can be hard to distinguish between a video game, an AI weapon, a VR training camp populated with real Hollywood actors, a therapeutic reenactment and reality itself; it’s harder still to recover. Set during his intensive period of deprogramming, Joe toggles between quixotic and disorienting memory flashes of his deployment, which are prone to shifting rules, pixelation and buffering. As he criss-crosses the strange, confusing, and at times absurd terrain of ‘militainment’ (the pervasive use of gaming and psychology to recruit, reprogram, train and deprogram contemporary military personnel), his grasp on what is real and what is virtual skews just beyond reach.
HOUSE OF JOY by MADHURI SHEKAR
In an Imperial Harem in a place like India in a time like 1666, Hamida, a bodyguard, wakes to the oppression in her midst and decides to do something about it.
Seduction, skullduggery and swordplay in a mythic, swashbuckling action-romance for the ages!