M-Theory: a play told in 11 dimensions by Jami Brandli

The near future. Former biographer Pauline Grey has shut herself and her daughter Ava away in a remote cabin in Angeles National Forest for nearly a year. Pauline will not let Ava go until she has the answers she is desperately seeking. But when a solar flare storm hits, cutting the women off from communication with the outside world, and a downed pilot appears at the cabin asking for help, Pauline's...
The near future. Former biographer Pauline Grey has shut herself and her daughter Ava away in a remote cabin in Angeles National Forest for nearly a year. Pauline will not let Ava go until she has the answers she is desperately seeking. But when a solar flare storm hits, cutting the women off from communication with the outside world, and a downed pilot appears at the cabin asking for help, Pauline's reality is challenged in more ways than one.

Development and Accolades:
Selected for Kitchen Dog Theater's 2022 New Works Festival, Dallas.
Selected for The Road Theatre's 12 Annual Summer Playwrights Festival, 2021, Los Angeles.
Finalist for 2021 Bay Area Playwrights Festival.
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M-Theory: a play told in 11 dimensions

Recommended by

  • Kitchen Dog Theater:
    27 Jul. 2023
    “ We are pleased to support this play and playwright! It was a featured staged reading in our 2022 New Works Festival at Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas, TX. ”
  • Premiere Stages:
    5 May. 2023
    “ Premiere Stages, the professional Equity theatre in residence at Kean University, is pleased to recognize “M-Theory” by Jami Brandli as a Semi-Finalist for the 2023 Premiere Play Festival. “M-Theory” rose through a competitive selection process conducted by Premiere staff and a panel of outside theatre professionals to become one of 40 Semi-Finalists out of 701 submissions. The panel was particularly impressed by the high level of theatricality in the play, and the simultaneous balance of grounded, well-developed characters. Our congratulations and thanks to Jami. ”
  • Joie Steele:
    29 Oct. 2022
    “ Diving into this play with essentially no knowledge of m-theory itself and other dimensions, this was such journey to read so fun to decipher. Brandi takes a subjectively convoluted ground plan plot and wonderfully brings the reader into the world and provides all the devices they need to help them understand. Brandi has created characters you can simultaneously empathize and feel frustrated with as you watch them struggle with life and relationships. Such a beautifully written clever piece. (Adelaide Young) ”
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PAULINE: Female, late 50s, any ethnicity. Has been searching for an answer for three years. So exhausted she doesn't feel exhausted. On the verge of something--whether a breakdown or breakthrough. She is forever wearing a threadbare tee-shirt and yoga pants and has an appetite for scotch.
AVA: Female, early 20s. Pauline's adopted daughter and must be a different ethnicity than Pauline. Wants to be an astronaut and is enamored with cosmology and her father's cosmological theories. She is trapped in the in-between.
FLYER: Female, 21. Must be a different ethnicity than Pauline and Ava. A young pilot on a mission. NOTE: It is not clear if she is a female or male when she first arrives.