David Cote

A carpenter named Joseph enters his shop one morning. The place is a mess: splintered wood on the floor, an axe embedded in a table, bloodstains on the wall, a small window smashed. Joseph starts to clean up, and as he does, tells us that he thinks his son may be dead. Yesterday, a traveling salesman described the execution of a young man, and Joseph thinks it may have been his son—whom he has not seen, along with his wife, in many years. This leads to Joseph telling the story of his family, with the promise of a special hand-carved trinket if we listen. Joseph married a virgin who became mysteriously pregnant, and Joseph raised the child as his own. Joseph works on a cradle as he recalls how an angel would visit him in dreams, how his son grew and developed a disturbing view of God and redemption. Eventually, Joseph must deal with the grief and shame he has repressed for years, as he shows us what he would have done to save his son from execution.

After a student uprising on a college campus about Shakespeare, students put on politically corrected versions of his greatest scenes.

One Friday evening the White House press corps are hastily assembled for a special announcement by the nation's first female President, Helen DeTroy. In this 10-minute verse play, sex, politics and iambic pentameter collide for a farcical look at power and desire.

In a hotel in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, African-American college student Alice is waiting to meet her birth mother. From infancy, Alice was raised in New England by white bestselling memoirist Madeleine Holmes. In the same hotel, there’s a global botany symposium painstakingly organized by Professor Edgar Nunby. But the staff is on strike and half the rooms have busted plumbing. An eco-radical group called the Pangaea Liberation Front is mounting an Occupy Wall Street-style protest outside. Throw in a pot-dealing British-Pakistani concierge, a trigger-happy Chinese security guard and Madeleine herself—who shows up hell-bent on bringing Alice back home—and soon identities and agendas are clashing wildly. Otherland is a serious farce about roots, race, adoption and how you have to create your belonging.

Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle instructs a rather poorly behaving class on the origin, operation and effect of comedy. This means he applies his famous scientific mental rigor to issues such as farting, fornicating with sheep, and getting kicked in the testicles. He asks that there be no laughing in class.

One cold October night in 1797, the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge tries frantically to complete “Kubla Khan” while his opium high is fading. He is interrupted by a man from the nearby town of Porlock, whose inane chatter distracts the writer. Who is this interloper, and will the great poem ever be finished?

After not speaking for nearly a year, Jay and Derek meet in a Brooklyn café, where Jay, a writer at a Gawker-type company, badgers Derek, an artist, for having zero Internet presence. After much friendly and not-friendly banter, Derek finally opens up and shares—overshares—what he's been up to, and it's not pretty. This leads to the question: Are we more than our digital footprint—or less? And perhaps the drone of social media just a screen for the ugly stuff that goes on in our lives.