Joe Sutton

We live in an age dominated and shaped by unbridled narcissists. IDEE FIXE is a play loosely based on one of them, a man I call Edward Banfield, a medical researcher responsible for the greatest single medical fraud of the 21st Century. His was the work that linked the MMR vaccine with regressive autism. And his work was a lie. And from that lie came an even greater hysteria – often referred to as “the Anti-Vax” movement – which in time, due to Covid, led to the otherwise avoidable death of literally hundreds of thousands of people.

IDEE FIXE tells the story of this fraud; its inception, its discovery, its aftermath – and it does so with a cast of six performers, one playing Banfield and the others serving as a chorus speaking together and at other times taking on individual roles. This company enters the theatre as one and surrounds a rectangle of light – the playing area – which they enter when playing individual scenes. Because of their proximity to the playing space, the actors are able to enter and exit in an instant, thereby allowing the play to move backwards and forwards in time, to highlight signi-ficant events, and along the way to pinpoint the moments when crucial, unforgivable mistakes are made.

By the end, we not only understand how such a catastrophe occurred – but we also have a better sense of just how dangerous this new breed of self-absorbed “leaders” tend to be.

Country music superstar Delilah is in the midst of yet another national tour when she is met by her one-time protege, a younger singer named Tulip Mays, who challenges her to confront her audience. She wants her to realize the gravity of the moment we're in -- and instead of giving the normal "wink-wink" she often does to consider how the fear and prejudice and even the sense of belonging to an entirely different nation...is contributing to the growing divide we’re all feeling. What Delilah realizes, however, is that doing so might put her entire career at risk.

Abigail Heskle, Studio Chief of one of Hollywood’s legacy studios has had yet another in a string of catastrophic bombs and her New York overlords are about to come out. And when they do, they will fire her — she has no doubt — unless she can come up with an idea. This last she tasks to her assistant, Cassidy Curtsy, and the idea she comes up with is a doozy. To spend every last dollar they’ve got to make a Marvel style movie centered on QAnon. In short, to become the movie studio for MAGA world. And to help with this effort, she has an eccentric QAnon influencer named Rish Nishkin waiting in the outside room with a script! Rish in turn brings the insanity up yet another notch by insisting that his movie must star a washed up, drunken action star — Bryce Barlow — in the leading role.

And thus is launched an endeavor that eventually creates a world war on the studio lot — brings “Q” himself into the picture — and ultimately results in the highest grossing movie in the history of Hollywood.

It’s called “Hollywood Ending”.

THE BEST IS YET TO COME is about Jan. 6, though at first it doesn’t know it. It actually starts when Lonnie Tingle calls his best friend Larry Huykuil and complains that his girlfriend has left a razor on the edge of the tub. He fears this means that she is planning to cheat on him, barely acknowledging that she has announced that she is going to the January 6th MAGA rally. And that’s when the phone rings. By now Larry is at Lonnie’s house, and together they learn that not only been a woman been shot as she enters the Capital – but that Kim, Lonnie’s girlfriend, has disappeared. And that’s when the police blow through the doors and arrest Lonnie.

So begins a Kafkaesque nightmare as Lonnie is interrogated only to discover, in fairly short, order that the people doing the interrogating are themselves, quite possibly, involved in ways they aren’t admitting.

And so it goes, Lonnie descending ever deeper into the rabbit hole that now is consuming our entire nation.

Complicit is about journalism in the era of waterboarding.
 
In this case, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Ben Kritzer is being threatened by a special prosecutor for revealing secrets about CIA black sites.  What makes his circumstances more poignant -- this same journalist once wrote a column suggesting that perhaps we could no longer afford to be so “squeamish” about torture.  But that column is now ancient history – as Ben is now being called before a special Grand Jury to tell what he knows.

And the play charts the suspense of learning whether or not Ben will.

And it does so in a world where things have changed. Where the goal posts have moved. Where jailing a journalist for lacking in patriotism is, for some, exactly what’s called for. It’s in this environment that we watch Ben, his wife, and his lawyer navigate the slippery ethical landscape presented during an era that anticipated "fake news".

In the spirit of STREETCAR, with echoes I hope all around.
 
Once again there are two sisters, the older somewhat deranged, the younger forever her apologist.  In this case, however, there are also a new husband, an ex-husband, and a young, teenaged daughter, the latter of whom Billie, the older sister, abandoned some two years before.
 
Now, two years later, she wants her old family back again -- and the play follows them through an entire year (fall, Christmas, winter, spring) as she attempts to fill a hole left so long ago, when her own mother -- so similarly -- abandoned her.

THE PATRIOT is the story of a revolution. But it isn’t a country that’s being over-thrown. It’s a news network. A cable news network. Fox News. Or, as it’s called in the play, “the Patriot”. The story highlights the moment when its two central figures, the network CEO, Walter Haas, and its star anchor, Paul Monaghan, clash over whether or not to use a white supremacist plot to start a new American civil war as a ratings driver.

In other words, THE PATRIOT is about the confluence of ratings, entertainment and politics. But it is, even more than that, about this moment in America. A moment which one of the characters describes as a time when America started to become South Africa. When we, like they, started our own Great Trek inland. When part of our population, so threatened by an America unlike the one they had grown up with... began to withdraw into a hardened shell.

And so of course it’s about Donald Trump as well.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH is a play about slavery, reparations, and not incidentally, Abraham Lincoln.

Actually, it centers on a young, African-American law student, Melanie Waters, who has come up with ingenious concept. Where for more than a century people have been trying to sue the United States government for reparations — only to come up against the doctrine of “sovereign immunity” (the United States cannot itself be sued) — she decides to sue a group of companies that got their start during slavery, benefiting from it, achieving via its exploitation what in legal terms is called “unjust enrichment”.

The only problem is the company she sues first is run by a Ted Turner-like figure with a streak of insanity named Billy Boy Talbert, who convinces Melanie to bring her lawyer to his vacation house in Jackson Hole, Wyoming to conduct their negotiations. This she does, only to encounter an absolutely extraordinary set of characters — Talbert’s one-time movie star wife, Nancy, a right-wing African-American television pundit, Carter Ridgeway, and Lance Johnson, a diminutive grammar school teacher who doubles in his spare time as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator.

This is the cast that Billy has assembled in order to test, and ultimately he hopes, reject Melanie’s claim. But they don’t. And they don’t in no small part because Melanie won’t let them.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH is a play that skewers every target along the way, while at the same time, by the end, addressing the most important question we have on this subject – just how much do we owe?

It’s the first years after the Second World War and George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and the soon to be published 1984, has decided to conduct a book tour of North America hoping to convince his readership that there's a difference between Socialism and Communism. And that in fact, he's a Socialist! But his readership, rabidly anti-Communist, doesn't want to hear it. And they protest noisily! It's a backlash his publishers anticipate -- and fear -- and therefore arrange to send a beautiful young executive, Carlotta Morrison, to his side, hoping to minimize the damage. It is, after all, the start of the McCarthy era; and they’d rather their star author left well enough alone.

US is a play about parental fear. In particular, it’s about that moment when teen-age kids begin to change and their parents feel like they no longer know who they are. And the parents get scared.

In this case, the parents are Mark and Mary. And after pulling their son Matt out of college -- ostensibly because of poor grades -- he is now living at home with them. And they don't know what to do.

Learning what to do is a painful process; one that reveals in each of them enormous weakness; as well as enormous love.

MAO HOUSE is about avoiding another cold war. It’s about China and the United States accommodating each other in the 21st century. It takes place in the midst of military tensions (a Chinese pilot having fired on an American ship), as more and more threats, both economic and military, are being made. And into this cauldron is sent a Hilary Clinton-like Secretary of State -- Katherine Ross -- to face off against a Chinese playboy diplomat -- Yang Boda -- in a set of secret, Kissinger-style negotiations.

These negotiations begin in “Mao House”, a seaside resort once used by Mao Tse Tung which the Chinese have left almost wholly unchanged since the time he left power. And Katherine is astonished by what she finds there. For it seems that Mao liked nothing so much as American gadgets; American electronics; and most of all, American records. Rat Pack records in particular. Sammy, Mel Torme, Dean. Mao, it seemed, liked to swing.

THE LISTING is a play about real estate. Real estate of the most obvious variety, property listings, price adjustments, but also real estate of subtler sort; that of the heart. And it tells this story, this story of real estate, going backwards in time.
It begins in 2011, on the day that Rich and Nora Jacobs are forced to sell their dream home. It ends then in 2000, on the day that very same couple is seen joyously buying that very same home. And in between is a decade we will never forget. A decade when the world’s markets crashed. When America went to war. When the World Trade Center came down. It was a decade when America changed forever.