Ripe Frenzy
by Jennifer Barclay
Ripe Frenzy, winner of the 2016-17 NNPN Smith Prize for Political Theatre, is having a 2018 National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere at New Rep in Boston, Synchronicity Theatre in Atlanta and Greenway Court in LA.
Ripe Frenzy is set in a small town in upstate New York, where the high school is famous for having done the most productions of Our Town of any school, ever. On opening night of the school’s...
Ripe Frenzy, winner of the 2016-17 NNPN Smith Prize for Political Theatre, is having a 2018 National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere at New Rep in Boston, Synchronicity Theatre in Atlanta and Greenway Court in LA.
Ripe Frenzy is set in a small town in upstate New York, where the high school is famous for having done the most productions of Our Town of any school, ever. On opening night of the school’s 40th production, a student open fires with an AR-15. Time is slippery as the play submerges us in the before, during and after of the shooting, using Our Town as a framework to examine what has become our new American norm. Told from the perspective of the mothers of the town, the play questions our own culpability in the perpetuation of mass shootings in our country.
From the beginning, Barclay has been collaborating with projections designer Jared Mezzocchi to embed media design into the text as its own subversive character. The play challenges us to investigate the ability of media to spread our current national contagion.
You can read the Boston Globe preview article for the New Rep premiere here:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2018/02/20/this-fictional-town-consequ…
You can read the American Theatre article featuring Ripe Frenzy here:
https://www.americantheatre.org/2018/04/02/plays-about-guns-with-varyin…
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