Daphne Maas is a drunken woman riding through the night on a mission, escorted by a surly cabdriver with whom she once had an abortive date. Her odyssey is to make sense of two tragedies: the recent death of her sister from what was supposed to be a minor illness, and the news that a high school friend has committed a sensational murder.

*UPDATE 2018: analysis of TORSO's take on female violence is included in the epilogue of a new textbook by Nancy Taylor Porter: "Violent Women in Contemporary Theatres: Staging Resistance" (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham): "Aggression is revealed as a human impulse that rises in response to perceived injustice...this violence in the play weaves through genders in a way that leaves it homeless."

*Awarded the American Theatre Critics Association’s M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award for 2013: “Our judges called the script gripping and a balancing act of serpentine plotting.”

*Named Best New Play of 2012 by Seattle Magazine: “Keri Healey’s Torso had us unable to look away from her tale of dark thoughts taken to darker places—even when we wanted to cover our eyes. Dual storylines followed a fratricide committed over a small financial dispute, and a woman so angry about her sister’s wrongful death, she can’t stop thinking about how to avenge it."

*Nominated for the 2012 Gregory Award (from Theatre Puget Sound) for Outstanding New Play

*Playwright Keri Healey was shortlisted for the 2012 Genius Award in Theater from The Stranger, Seattle's preeminent weekly newspaper: “This March, Seattle audiences got to watch Healey's already prodigious gifts as a writer take a jet-fueled leap forward with her play Torso. One part of it was loosely based on a real-life murder between siblings she knew growing up. The other part involved a woman (loosely based on herself) spending a night riding around with a taxi driver, trying to make sense of the murder while struggling with homicidal urges of her own. With Torso, Healey pulled the magical trick of turning people into monsters and back into people again. There's a word for that—empathy—but her depth of empathy, which informs all of her work, is rare in any writer. Midway through Torso, a sad-clown type of man walks into a living room, covered in blood, twitchily explaining how he'd just clumsily murdered his brother (over a relatively paltry sum of money). The man's sister grabs a plastic kiddie pool and hoses him off while he talks. And while we recoil from him—covered in his brother's blood, real Cain and Abel stuff—Healey carefully built the play so we genuinely feel bad for this dumb and pathetic murderer, slathered in gore. That is genius.”