Harmon dot aut

A Neurodivergent psychology student becomes dangerously obsessed with understanding a local murderer, impersonating a doctor to gain access to him in prison, leading to both professional success and personal destruction as he struggles to reconcile human connection with his dark fascination. Structured around Josh's time blindness and distraction as they become more and more fixated on the murder, chronology slowly loses any validity.

Jeanine is a 50ish Neurodivergent/Disabled poet who connects with people through her online poetry forum. When a horrible crime hits close to home, Jeanine becomes obsessed with finding out Why it happened, even if that drive threatens the well-being of her family. Her family reacts by putting Jeanine on lockdown, disconnecting her from her poetry platform and silencing her voice. There is a fine line between care and control. A parable about authoritarianism.

Description by playwright Craig Lucas:
“I’ve never come across anything like the play Tornado Tastes like Aluminum Sting. We are inside the mind of the protagonist, an 11-year-old autistic child who is also nonbinary. They apprehend the world through a different set of tools than I possess. They are obsessed with movies, a walking library of cinema history. But the three-dimensional world they inhabit is an overwhelming swirl of sensations, sights crossed with sounds crossed with metaphoric echoes of ideas stimulated by everything they encounter in history books, in the community, in the lives of the parents. This over-stimulated mixmaster of the character’s aspirations colliding with the joys and terrors of the world outside their own mind creates a storm. And that is what we are placed inside—right in the eye of that funnel. The walls of this young mind literally swim with the projected movie footage of their omnivorous gaze, using comic bits to show horrific things. I would kill to direct such a work. For me it is akin to the most original and sui generis works one stumbles on in a lifetime—Samuel Beckett’s 'Not I', Sarah Kane’s '4:48 Psychosis', Maria Irene Fornes’ 'Drowning'.”

Set in the waiting room of an underfunded mental health clinic in rural Oklahoma, Space introduces us to Margaret, a mad, nonbinary autistic poet who is waiting for an Access-A-Ride. As we wait with them, we gain insight into the frustrations of dealing with Medicaid red tape, the challenges of being 'other' in a poverty-stricken rural town, and we glimpse fragments of Margaret's inner light through poetry and pop culture.

H., an Autistic/Non-Binary artist, guides us through short scenes from their life: misdiagnosis & electro-shock therapy, imagining a father they never knew, etc. H. shows us how they created Joy out of moments of despair, and reaches out, through song, to share that Joy with everyone.