Winner of the 2012 Maxim Mazumdar New Play Competition
(original title, "Cut-Ups")

Two orphan girls, Haley and Renata, inhabit a surreal landscape following the death of their mother, a silent movie fanatic and ex-Red Light District actress. The girls eke out a secret existence in a bombed-out, empty, charred shell of a home, with only some remnants of old furniture, everything burned or charred at the edges. Haley and Renata grieve the loss of their mother in distinctly different ways: Haley, the younger, escapes into fantasy, as well as into the images from the silent films her mother used to love; while Renata buries her grief under an avalanche of household chores. The girls bicker, dream, commiserate, entertain one another, keep house and live by their wits. But when Buster Keaton mysteriously appears on the eve of Haley’s ninth birthday, the boundaries of the girls’ reality are stretched to breaking point. The surreal, magical arrival of Buster Keaton sets in motion the unraveling of secrets, both past and present, and is the catalyst for the discovery by both girls that they must leave one another behind, and find their own separate ways in the world, if they are going to survive.