Sara Farrington

Dr. Uncanny Presents: Moreau '96 is the musical adaptation of Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau, directed by David Gregory, courtesy of Severin Films. It's the making of the 1996 New Line Cinema film The Island of Dr. Moreau, which many believe to be the worst movie ever made. Our musical breaks down what went wrong, through a fictional UHF show called The Dr. Uncanny Show, hosted by horror movie expert Dr. Uncanny. The show is hilarious, gothic and moving, an interrogation of commercialism working in direct conflict with artistic vision and the insurmountable toxicity of fame, money and ego.

It’s Hollywood, 1994. Rebekah Skilling’s a rising star, oblivious to the Hollywood sharks circling. Soon, New Line Cinema has her directing a low-budget Island of Dr. Moreau, her dream project.

Rebekah is thrilled until an impossibly demanding Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer are hired, a warlock’s curse is cast and broken, Beast People grow drunker, higher and more sexually active, hurricanes destroy the Australian jungle set, and that’s just the beginning.

Look Out is a 75-minute 2-hander set in 1999. Mara and Ruth Glass are teenagers, a drama kid and a punk (both played by adults) trapped inside the bedroom where their mother attempted suicide earlier that evening. Over the course of the play, the girls piece together the insidious anti-feminist motivators driving their mother’s life and inevitable suicide. Soon, the portrait of a woman destroyed by society, misogyny, Hollywood, men and diet culture emerges. As the girls anticipate a phone call with news of whether their mom is dead or alive, the girls unravel her very being and so much more in turns playacting, mimicking, obfuscating, blaming, physically and verbally sparring, even singing and dancing to pop music, all of which has a double meaning in their world. Like 2 Cassandras, they also predict the dark world approaching on “the other side of the century.” Look Out is a female teenaged girl's view of death, afterlife, beforelife, entropy, god, meaning, nihilism and finally a great epiphany: The girls share an unspeakably dark secret and have no choice but to break generational patterns.

In a flash of modern warfare (Gaza? Israel? Ukraine? Afghanistan? Vietnam? Poland? Hiroshima?), a mother loses her child. In her moment of tragic realization, she becomes a Trojan woman, performing every iconic character in Euripides play.

[FULL LENGTH] Mendacity is a terrifying, comedic and ‘pataphysical imagining of the three months between Nov 3rd, 2020 and Jan 20th, 2021 told through a transformed version of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and the added element of new media & video projection.

[FULL LENGTH] BrandoCapote is a multimedia dance theater piece inspired by a 1957 New Yorker magazine profile of the actor by Truman Capote.Disguised as an interview, BrandoCapote evolves into our own version of In Cold Blood, Capote's true crime masterwork. In BrandoCapote, like In Cold Blood, Capote puts a human face on an inhuman act, exposing generations of toxic masculinity, abuse and violence.

[FULL LENGTH] CasablancaBox is an exploration into the accidental nature of great art through the lens of the classic Casablanca. With an intricately woven multi-narrative script and video score, CasablancaBox is an imagined "making of" and an immersion into the glamour, war, censorship, sexism, racism, addiction and refugee crisis of 1940s Hollywood. Both madcap and affecting, with an intricately woven multi-narrative script and video score, CasablancaBox is an imagined "making of" tribute to the movie you thought you knew.

[FULL LENGTH] Leisure, Labor, Lust is a queer psychodrama, set in two opposing versions of New York City in 1907: the opulent world of Edith Wharton uptown and the squalid world Jacob Riis downtown. Sparked by a suicide, four characters toss their tangled versions of an ever-expanding narrative back and forth, reenacting their unreliable memories, jumping in and out of time, space, character and gender. The fifth character is a stranger, Delancey Morris, who is never seen, but holds the other four others' lives in the balance.

[FULL LENGTH] Mickey’s dad and Sage’s mom are really, really good friends. Every day after school, Mickey’s dad drops Mickey off at Sage’s house and the two kids (played by adults) are forced to play together in Sage’s tightly fenced-in backyard while the parents are “hanging out.” The kids spend the endless hours rationalizing adult behavior, making sense of the cosmos, spying on their disturbing neighbors and surviving each other. Both funny and tragic, Mickey & Sage examines the clarity, beauty and brevity of childhood by constantly asking, “What happens to people?”

Lucky Breaks is a stage adaptation of selected short stories from Lucky Breaks, written by Yevgenia Belorusets, reimagined by playwright Sara Farrington, directed by Jaclyn Biskup, and devised and performed by our ensemble of five female actors. The stories are often bleakly comic, beginning and ending abruptly, depicting the haunting effects of the 2014 Russian invasion on the lives of civilian women. A woman who runs a flower shop vanishes suddenly and no one asks questions. In another, a woman takes her war-induced rage out on her broken umbrella. In another scene, a woman on a crowded street suddenly decides she can no longer walk and renders herself forever a “living monument.” The absurdist tone and language of each brief story are transformed into a physical score, bending reality to capture the rootless tortured experience of female victims of war and occupation.

[FULL LENGTH] On May 18th, 1863 Union troops fell upon the river city of Vicksburg, MS and fought for it until July 4th, a total of 47 days. To escape the relentless artillery fire, mortar attacks and bombardments, the citizens of Vicksburg, mostly women, children and soon-to-be-former slaves, dug and hid in a series of 500 caves in the hills and bluffs of the city. Near Vicksburg is about three people hiding in a cave: Jane, a Southern woman, her husband's slave, George, and Jane's teenaged daughter. As the war rages inches away, Jane and George create their own version of society in the claustrophobic cave, with its own set of rules, boundaries, language and physicality.

[FULL LENGTH - ONE-WOMAN SHOW] One woman plays Honduran mothers and children seeking asylum, ICE officers, gangsters, sex traffickers, murderous extortionists, privileged American moms, Texas truckers, The Incredible Hulk and many more. Inspired by true stories that Sara Farrington heard from the mothers who lived them while working for an organization she helped found in 2018, Immigrant Families Together.

[FULL LENGTH] A little triceratops journeys the development of the known universe, from the death of the dinosaurs all the way to a climate change ruined world, buried in plastic, all in search of the perfect family. A perfect play for elementary, middle and high schoolers, both in cast and audience. Very loosely inspired by characters in Italo Calvino's short stories.

[FULL LENGTH] Miles and Milo are the two most brilliant, multi-talented, multi-genred artists in the entire known universe. Each day they sit outside an arts funding organization, The Sunshine Foundation, protesting what they believe is a deliberate attempt to hold them down. Until one day, the Sunshine Foundation grants them unlimited funds. Slowly but surely, these two incredible artists spiral downward into bland, repressed, NPR-listening drones. An hysterical, poignant and farcical look at the struggles of an artist in a commercially driven world.

[ONE-ACT] A one-act play adaptation of the very obscure, probably never read, World War II-era noir novel, Sally's in The Alley, by Norbert Davis. This play is a hilarious spoof of film noir style, language and aesthetic, set in a twisted world of talking and smoking vultures, gigantic dogs and murders in the desert.