IN DEVELOPMENT
Jo March Madness: LIVE!
WHAT! IS! UP, EVERYONE?! WELCOME to JO MARCH MADNESS: LIVE! - the March Madness where YOU decide who gets to marry Ben Langhorst (host) and save him from his sad, little life.
JO MARCH MADNESS!!!!
There are a bevy of beautiful male celebrities that Ben would let absolutely destroy his life. He sets up the matches, but YOU the audience will decide who moves on to the next round.
If you can hear the voice of Saoirse Ronan/Winona Ryder/Katharine Hepburn - no you don't!
JO MARCH MADNESS!!!!
Jo March Madness: LIVE! is part game show, part improv session, part performance art, and worthy of a psych eval (don’t place the call - we already did).
JO MARCH MADNESS!!!! LIVE!!!!
Written and Performed By: Ben Langhorst
Directed By: Charlotte Murray
Photos by Lindsey White, Aoife Hough, Jessica Hart.
Beta Test performed at Caveat
The Bollywood Wedding Project
An epically theatricalized Indian wedding: multiple days (a.k.a. plays), too many guests (including the audience), singing and dancing (ever seen a Bollywood movie?), and plenty of drama (there will be aunties).
Family and friends from across the globe travel to India to celebrate Priya’s marriage to her longtime girlfriend, Maya. However, for the three siblings who will serve as our protagonists, returning home after years of immersing themselves in American culture is a sticky mix of strange and familiar, causing them to grapple with difficult questions about living at the intersection of two cultures. What does it mean to come back to a culture you have left? What do you lose when you leave? What can, or should, you hold on to? Can you fully live in two cultures or must you sacrifice parts of each to live in both? What, if anything, do we owe our culture(s) and communities?
Co-Created By: Charlotte Murray and Ankita Raturi
FreshGroundPepper PlayGround PlayGroup
whale/wail/wale
whale/wail/wale is a musical triptych that focuses on three moments in history where whales must contend with the ever-growing interference and cruelty of humanity.
In Part I, whaling ships choke the sea as whales are being hunted to the point of extinction - their ribs and blubber provide the raw material for corsets and oil. Sperm whales especially are teetering on the brink of extinction, as industry demands their pound of flesh for human profit. While the women of one particular Sperm whale pod desperately try to keep the birthrate high, Ella, an ingénue past her prime, believes that if she could communicate with the humans and make them understand their impact, they would stop their brutality.
In Part II, the Cold War rages on in 1968, but multiple nuclear submarines keep mysteriously sinking. Nuclear warfare has invaded the ocean, its waters used as a testing site that has caused the decimation of multiple ecosystems (like the Bikini Atoll). Meanwhile, a pair of gay North Atlantic Right Whales search for a new home safe from this chaos. A vessel strikes one of the whales — fatally injuring them. Now on borrowed time, this couple must decide how to spend what little time they have left, and whether or not their fight will make any difference.
In Part III, Orcas are being studied in the Salish Sea of the Pacific Northwest in 2025. The Orcas, seen as an apex predator in the ocean, now feel constrained as scientists tag them and monitor them with drones and AI. An older Orca named Janice (who has no surviving children of her own) is trying to keep her pod together, with another mating season just around the corner. But the Orcas who can still breed have to ask themselves: Is it responsible to bring new life into this world that descends further and further into chaos, one in which they are being surveilled at every turn?
whale/wail/wale challenges the audience with a new perspective on our long history with the ocean, with a specific empathy for the marine life caught in the crosshairs of our own self destruction. By centering the whales as the protagonists of this climate crisis narrative, we radically reframe how climate change stories are often told. The real question is: will we do what is right, or will we allow tensions to continue to rise until the ocean drowns us all?
Written By: Ben Langhorst