Tori Keenan-Zelt

A play-in-progress by Tori Keenan-Zelt and Elinor T Vanderburg, developed with and directed by Portia Krieger. The Permanent Collection is an exploration of our relationships to the cultural and scientific institutions that framed the world for us. It's about how we experienced the American Museum of Natural History as kids and how our kids experience it now. And it's the story of friendship between a white mom and a Black soon-to-be-mom in 2024.

The museum sorts us into categories: colonized and colonizers. How does the institution protect itself? What does it take to break down these categories? Should the museum exist at all? What else could we put in its place?

What do you remember about JonBenét Ramsey?

When best friends Molly and Rae were 12, they secretly played JonBenét Ramsey at sleepovers; 20 years later, in the wake of Molly's sudden death, her 12-year-old daughter, Hazel, knocks on the door of Rae's guidance office with their old playbook in hand. As Hazel and Rae slide back into the game, each navigates her own unresolved grief. The JonBenét Game explores the delicate, dangerous, and often grey space that true crime gives women to face their worst fears.

How do we grieve? How do we heal? When do we grow up?

In The JonBenét Game, none of these questions are easily answered, but asking them will keep you on the edge of your seat.

When the hapless, unemployed actress Stace opts out of her marriage, she becomes (rather suddenly) a live-in nanny for her best friend, his husband, and their newborn baby. But then she gets the chance of a lifetime: an audition for a French Horror Theater. Hilarity, mayhem and Grand Guignol hijinks ensue with the only prop available. Baby, it gets bloody. A darkly visceral, absurdly comic play about parenting, pregnancy, abortion, and physical self-agency.

In this contemporary reimagining of the Persephone myth, a nonbinary teenage goddess straddles her divorced parents’ realities until she meets a human girl and must define her own power to remake a ruined world.

What do we do when we acknowledge the generational cycles our parents have imprinted upon us? Seph and Heather, Demeter and Hades, and the Fates who came before them all must face the now ruined world with the same question we face with today’s extreme temperatures and legislative attacks on reproductive rights: what do we do now?

SEPH is a new play by Tori Keenan-Zelt, featuring original music written by Nashville musician Anna Haas.

Originally developed in Fresh Ground Pepper’s BRB Retreat and PlayGround PlayGroup

At 13, Ursa, Hannah, Linney, and Maeve live in their own world of basements, secrets, and backyard ghosts — until the last sleepover of the summer. High school looms, with the promise and threat of reinvention, and the group fractures when shifting beliefs and identities collide in a traumatic accident that none of them can explain. Four years later, questions and accusations fly as the survivors revisit the scene of the “crime” and try to understand what happened, what has been lost, and who they are now.

As the Civil War draws to a close, cholera and Gettysburg have claimed the lives of two husbands. In this wickedly funny play, two young women grapple with the freedom and power of their new widowhood. If they had the chance to have their husbands back, would they take it?

As Glory and Kyle try to flip a falling-down house in an abandoned neighborhood, they discover that the evicted owners have been living secretly in a hollowed-out wall. A surreal comedy about what happens when a new generation tries to build something from the broken pieces another generation hasn't given up yet.

Kenley is a goldfish who was adopted by birds. When his mother decides she'd rather be an ice dancer than teach him how to fly, he must learn to navigate the world on his own. He meets a cat. 

A satirical re-imagining of the 1960s Batman television series.

ATTENTION BAT FANS! You’re invited to a live taping of the derring dos of the Dynamic Duo! On this week's episode: As the graceful gals of our fair city prepare to compete in the hallowed Lady Gotham scholarship competition, felonious feline fugitive Catwoman sinks her claws into a plan that could unravel the whole ball of string. Can Batman and Robin make this cat stray, or will mischief and mayhem purr-vail? Tune in to find out. Same Bat-time. Same Bat-channel.

Set in a fantastical version of 1880s Egypt, EGYPT PLAY is a dark comedy (with puppets) that probes a British widow's quest to throw off her oppressive life through tourism and asks how an individual can get her hands on freedom without swallowing others’.

An almost silent play for actors who have movement, clowning, and/or mime. When Sara, a jaded and broken young woman, is forced to compete with a clown for her piece of sidewalk, she finds herself becoming unexpectedly drawn into an impromptu street performance that will begin to transform her.

A musical without music. Work becomes play becomes rage when three store clerks hear “Welcome to Walgreens” one time too many.