Mallory Jane Weiss

Lunch is dead. That is, Grenade Launcher — the last male white rhino (a SIGNATURE EXHIBIT) at the once-glorious (now, not-so-much) Greenwood Zoo — has died. This is really going to impact the sale to the German investor. Thankfully, Lunch impregnated one of the female white rhinos before he kicked the bucket — it's just not the one they thought he loved. Over the course of the sixteen-month gestation period, the two female white rhinos — Margot and Emily Dickinson — attempt to heal their broken friendship, while the zoo's education department — namely, Ramona, Nat, and Leo — must wait to discover not only the fate of the zoo but the fate of the near-extinct white rhino.

R.I.P Lunch (the last male white rhino at the zoo) is a play about the inextricable nature of endings and beginnings and how we hold loss and love simultaneously.

It's 1548, and Giacomo has to teach the first day of class because Ferrari is coming on a very slow horse. There's a lot of math to cover... but first, in order to know math, we need to know history. And in order to know history, we need to know men. Specifically, Italian men. And so begins THE CUBIC!, a play (with little regard for actual fact) that traces the discovery of the cubic equation (x^3 + ax = b) and the many men who laid claim over it, all leading up to a big decision for Giacomo.

This piece is loosely (oh so loosely) based on the Cardano vs. Tartaglia debate, an actual moment in actual history. But the play reimagines the history to ask questions about what it means to achieve greatness, how we create a legacy, and whether we can hold ambition and kindness simultaneously.

The lexicographer is coming! Tuesday and Door have one job: lower the drawbridge. But what if the lexicographer comes bearing language for their FEELINGS this time?! That sounds… [like a word for when a bear is coming and you’re holding a ham sandwich]. DRAWBRIDGE is a play about the potential power of words and the people that help us find them.

Forty years ago, Penelope, Bobbi, and Evelyn last waved goodbye to their husbands (Owen, Percy, and Hugo), as the men embarked on a perilous journey. It’s now forty years later, and the women, now all nearly 70 years old, receive a phone call. It turns out, their husbands aren’t dead after all. The men are coming home. They come bearing tales, talismans, and a dangerous proposition: youth. Oh, and the men haven’t aged a day since they left. BIG, BLACK SUNHATS is a play that explores time — how we pass it, the stories that live outside of it, and what we do when it’s handed to us in new ways. It’s a play that asks questions about youth, marriage, waiting, and womanhood.

In an isolated boarding school community, five women from four generations grapple with love, rumors, tradition, and translations over the course of a single academic year — from the early days of autumn to a springtime eclipse. This play takes place simultaneously in a myth — the story of which offers explanation for the creation of the school and illuminates the inevitable testing of the close bonds formed within its walls.

"Anaphora" is a play about cycles, about language, and about coming of age again and again. It’s a play that asks questions about how we translate our identities as a way to seek certainty, what it means to want to be held and accepted by a place that wasn’t built for you, and how we become more legible to those we love.

Riya, Morgan, and Frites are the only women on the pit crew for Scuderia Pirandello's Formula 1 racing team. Actually, they're the only women in all of Formula 1... and it's not quite how they imagined it. Over the course of the season they travel around the world, from race track to race track, feeding their desire to win (trophies! champagne!) and grappling with the inherent danger of being a woman in a man's world.

In a fictitious-kind-of-1844-or-so, Kipper, Mary, Sadie, and Alice are “The Page Turners,” a book club determined to redeem themselves after their disgraceful showing at last year’s Book Club Conference. In part one, “the marriage plot”, the women meet Oliver, a famous, new author, who they hope will give their team a leg-up at next year’s conference. Kipper and Oliver immediately hit it off; wedding plans are soon underway. As Kipper grapples with what marriage will mean for her legacy, her fellow book-club members also struggle with questions of identity. Sadie is adamant that she isn’t sexually repressed (or a lesbian); Alice is being actively haunted by the ghost of her great-grandmother; and Mary is convinced that her husband (on whom she cheated) is having an affair of his own. Part two, “interiority, consciousness, and the first-person narrator,” transitions from matrimony to self. When a new author, Harry, a woman writing under a male pseudonym, enters the scene, everything changes. Suddenly, the women don’t even know what they don’t know. In part three, “modernism: absurd, symbolic, and experimental,” time hurdles rapidly through the final months before the Book Club Conference, as the women attempt to find individual closure before it arrives.

THE PAGE TURNERS explores questions of guilt, motherhood, self, and, of course, propriety in today’s society. It questions how we might shape our identities as women not by society’s rules but rather by the women we surround ourselves with, the choices that we make, and the books that we read.

Dave and Julia are father and daughter. And they’re hanging out. This is a play that both makes a banana-phone joke and asks whether jokes have an expiration date. How do we connect when we no longer find the same things funny? How do we know that we’re on the same team if we aren’t laughing together? We’ll figure it out, just don’t look down.

A Wild West. A world where men ride horses and women ride bicycles. A world that is changed forever when Ruthie’s husband, Jack (biggest pistol in town), wins three larger-than-life stallions in an auction. Hell-bent on riding the stallions, Ruthie finds herself enticed by Rooster and Pearl, two women with their eyes set on the horizon line, on a place impossible to reach by bicycle. With the help from a forward-thinking heifer (yes, a cow), the women discover the kind of strength female friendship can inspire. And ultimately, they try to find a place all their own.

After the moon, Luna, has her heart broken, she decides to hit the road, leaving Lily, the muse of astronomy, to her most challenging mission yet. Lily sneaks off to Earth to inspire famous-astronomer Orion to bring Luna back. But when Blue, a painter in a rut, accidentally turns Orion into a jackal with a sketch, Lily finds herself more intrigued (and, perhaps, inspired herself) by Blue than the task at hand. What really matters at the end of the world? And is it possible that art floats?

When Maebh, a selkie (half-woman, half seal) reveals that she had a whole lifetime in the world above (Long Beach Island, NJ), her granddaughter, Cap, runs from her magical, underwater home to meet the family she never knew she had. But when the underwater ministry council votes to destroy the world above, Cap’s high-strung best friend, Pinni (with the help of ministry postal worker, Brendan) must either save the world or convince Cap to leave her now-sister, Jane, and return home. A play about sisterhood and saying goodbye; seals and violin teachers; the world ending and feeling as though it might.

Five of the top female sled dogs — Lucy, Doon, Logan, Iva, and Hope — battle it out during pre-season for two slots on the mythical Siberian sled dog team. But as civil unrest grows outside the camp, it becomes clear that this sled is about much more than a race. Inside Siberia is a play about female athletes and the contradictory expectations placed upon them as athletes and women. What does it mean to represent something greater than yourself and what do you do when you no longer believe in what you represent?

Margaret is a woman, an octopus, and a comedian, and she can’t sleep. After a conversation with her partner about whether or not they’re ready to have kids, Margaret finds herself wide awake. Somewhere deep in her DNA, she knows that octopuses used to die after they had children. And even though things have changed… it doesn’t feel like things have changed. Can she… have it all?