Electricidad
Written by Luis Alfaro
Borderlands Theater (Tucson, AZ)
Barclay Goldsmith, Executive Producer

This “Chicano take on Sophocles’ Electra,” as the playwright describes it, is a retelling of the Greek story of murder and matricide, set in a bleak, post-modern desert of drugs, violence, and retribution. 

Fiction
Written by Steven Dietz
McCarter Theater Company (Princeton, NJ)
Emily Mann, Artistic Director   

Linda and Michael, successful writers who happen to be married to each other, thrive on the give-and-take of their unusually honest relationship.  But when they decide to share their diaries, the boundaries between past and present, fact and fiction, trust and betrayal begin to break down.  No life, it turns out, is an open book. 

Tundra
Written by Joseph Fisher
Stark Raving Theater (Portland, OR)
Matthew B. Zrebski, Producing Artistic Director

Set in a frozen town that sits on the arctic tree line, Tundra explores the loneliness and solitude that takes place in the frozen landscape of a tortured composer’s soul.  With a structure that weaves in and out of points of time, Tundra speaks of the human emotional defense mechanism…the shutting down of the heart to avoid pain, and the journey back to thaw it once again.

Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
Written by Luis Alfaro
Center Theater Group (Los Angeles, CA)
Gordon Davidson, Artistic Director/Producer

Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner is the story of two sisters, Minerva (the fat one) and Alice (the skinny one) and the dynamics of family that force Minerva to one day start to grow so impossibly large that she starts to float away.  Is it the middle-class suburb life or a family history of service that keeps filling Minerva up with something more than just pounds? 

Maria Kizito
Written by Erik Ehn
Seven Stages (Atlanta, GA)
Del Hamilton, Artistic Director

Maria Kizito reflects on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.  The project considers events through the lens of a factual contemporary trial of a Benedictine nun who was found guilty of complicity in genocide, and then sentenced to twelve years in prison at a trial in Brussels in 2001.  This play is about faith, and about how different and strange it is in its politics, esthetics, and its felt reality.

Hannah and Martin
Written by Kate Fodor
Epic Theater Center (New York, NY)

Based on the true story of the love affair between two philosophers, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, in Germany before World War II, Hannah and Martin explores the political consequences of personal compromise.

The Mystery Plays
Written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
Source Theater Company (Washington, D.C.)

The Mystery Plays is comprised of two interrelated one acts, loosely based on the tradition of the medieval mystery play.  In the first play, “The Filmmaker’s Mystery,” a director of horror films survives a terrible train wreck, only to be haunted by the ghost of one of the passengers who didn’t survive.  In the second play, “Ghost Children,” a woman travels to a small town in rural Oregon to make peace with the man who brutally murdered her parents and younger sister sixteen years earlier. Like the original mystery plays, these works wrestle with the most profound of human ideas:  the mysteries of death, the afterlife, religion, faith, and forgiveness --- in a uniquely American way.