The Creature

Soon, a biomedically-engineered creature is grown in the body of a graduate student – and then soon becomes later. A speculative play about care, reproduction, bodies, and every wild thing.
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The Creature

Recommended by

  • Diego Barba:
    7 Mar. 2023
    I adore how sprawling this piece is, and yet the creature remains at the center of everything. This piece is enlightening, terrifying, an epic, and oh, so necessary. What Derman has to say about ethics and research and genetic engineering and autonomy seem like issues of a future time, out of grasp. However, bodily autonomy is an ever-present, pressing issue in our society- and The Creature tackles it head on.
  • Conor McShane:
    7 Mar. 2023
    This play knocked me flat on my ass; a breathtaking piece of speculative theatre that gets at some compellingly big questions around personhood, parenthood, bodily autonomy, sentience, and more. It starts out as one thing before transitioning into something much stranger and equally fascinating. I love any play that takes big swings and leads its audience on a journey, and this play manages that in such a thrilling way.
  • Aly Kantor:
    5 Jan. 2023
    This play is terrifying and strange—an impossible, theatrical, speculative poem that could never happen and is already happening. The many questions it asks are fascinating at best and uncomfortable at worst—but as an embodied human being capable of reproduction, they were all equally harrowing and relevant to my life today. Even the most alien and unfamiliar aspects of the story came with a disquieting dose of deja vu (future nostalgia?). The biggest compliment I can pay this play is that it made me feel A LOT of things in a very brief (and somehow infinite) period of time.

Development History

  • Reading
    ,
    Brown University
    ,
    2022

Awards

Finalist
,
Playwrights Conference
,
Seven Devils New Play Foundry
,
2023
Finalist
,
Starr Reading Series
,
2022