Mark Helfman

Heaven and Hell are rival bureaucracies. When an eager young angel launches an experimental mission to “fix” a corrupt bar-and-casino tycoon, she expects redemption. Instead, her intervention triggers a corporate, spiritual, and emotional chain reaction that forces her to choose between following Heaven’s rules or following her conscience as she struggles to save a man everyone else has abandoned.

THE PLAY IN ONE LINE: What do we owe the system that let us in — and what do we owe the people it keeps out?

THE WORLD:
A prosperous farm run by an iron hierarchy — pigs govern, farm animals comply, and outsiders wait at the gate.
When a young goat earns her conditional place inside the fence, she discovers that the rules that admitted her are
the same rules that will be used to expel her family. Dark allegorical fable with no comic relief.

WHY NOW: As institutional belonging is revoked across economic and civic life, this play dramatizes what it costs to have
played by the rules — and what it means when the rules change anyway.

A group of cavepeople must confront a dire reality: they're short on food, winter's approaching, most animals have disappeared, their chief just died, and their shaman can no longer summon the spirits. The tribe's administrator proposes a revolutionary calendar-based system of gathering and cultivation. The chief's young successor rallies the others around an audacious solution: kill a mastodon, the biggest game, a feat as yet considered impossible. The hunt fails, forcing a reckoning that will determine whether adaptation or extinction awaits.

Two men reflect on their life decisions as they bury a fellow member of "the tribe."