Daniel Hirsch

Dave’s lonely days are finally over: he’s fallen for a lovely young woman named Sophie. The only problem: Sophie may not be a lovely young woman at all. Her real identity could destroy Dave and—given his not-so insignificant job— may have grave repercussions on nothing less than global security and world peace.

Cat has an unusual request of her family: she’d like all the family photos that feature her to be destroyed. The people in her life really, really do not take this request well.

What follows is a tragicomedy about family and memory, a Sisyphean quest to reject modern media, a debate over representation and expression, and a exploration into the very nature of seeing and being seen.

Kate is having a rough Monday. On top of the fact that she has a new coworker named Alan who won’t shut up, she’s realizing that her job in the User System QA team might be utterly devoid of meaning. Also, she’s probably going to die... As the Mondays accumulate, Kate’s small world is upended when Alan wrangles her into an unexpected friendship. The bond between this pair moves from strained to surprisingly tender. However, neither can predict how the forces of late-stage, tech-fueled capitalism or one’s impending mortality might muck up their non-romantic, workplace romance.

In the 60 seconds between jumping out of an airplane and deploying their parachutes, when their bodies are plummeting to the earth at a rate of 120 miles-per-hour, four people have much to think about their lives and how those lives will be forever changed when—or, if—they get their feet back on the ground.

A committee of concerned citizens brainstorm strategies to get rid of a gigantic boulder that has mysteriously appeared in their town. A scientist suddenly becomes too overwhelmed with the inadequacy of language to talk geology. A woman can’t get out of bed due to distress over the world’s exceedingly grim state of affairs — also, there’s a gigantic, invisible boulder on her chest. And, the mythic hero Sisyphus has to roll a boulder up a mountain only to watch it roll back down over and over and over and over again. Through a series of connected, enigmatic vignettes riffing on the myth of Sisyphus, The Sisyphi asks: when faced with your own futility and the unceasing meaningless of the universe, why bother?

A new technology is poised to make you obsolete. A mysterious folk hero named Ned Ludd has come to town plotting this machine’s destruction. Do you join Ludd, grab a hammer, and swing? Or, do you wait and see how this whole Industrialization thing shakes out? Inspired by the Industrial Revolution’s Luddite Uprisings as well as the politics of our own self-driving Uber age, Roguish Machine tells the story of Charlie and Eliza, two siblings whose fates diverge with the arrival of a newfangled, mechanical invention. Who gets left behind, and who gets unforeseen opportunities, when technology marches inevitably forward? 

Rick can’t get into his dead son’s laptop. Sasha can’t get Rick out of her apartment. Together, these two—along with the computer that becomes a ghostly, and rather smug, presence—form an unlikely household. Both wish they better understood the departed roommate and son that brought them together—though Sasha may not be sharing all that she knows about the young man’s last days.