Keri Healey

Daphne Maas is a drunken woman riding through the night on a mission, escorted by a surly cabdriver with whom she once had an abortive date. Her odyssey is to make sense of two tragedies: the recent death of her sister from what was supposed to be a minor illness, and the news that a high school friend has committed a sensational murder.

*UPDATE 2018: analysis of TORSO's take on female violence is included in the epilogue of a new textbook by Nancy Taylor Porter: "Violent Women in Contemporary Theatres: Staging Resistance" (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham): "Aggression is revealed as a human impulse that rises in response to perceived injustice...this violence in the play weaves through genders in a way that leaves it homeless."

*Awarded the American Theatre Critics Association’s M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award for 2013: “Our judges called the script gripping and a balancing act of serpentine plotting.”

*Named Best New Play of 2012 by Seattle Magazine: “Keri Healey’s Torso had us unable to look away from her tale of dark thoughts taken to darker places—even when we wanted to cover our eyes. Dual storylines followed a fratricide committed over a small financial dispute, and a woman so angry about her sister’s wrongful death, she can’t stop thinking about how to avenge it."

*Nominated for the 2012 Gregory Award (from Theatre Puget Sound) for Outstanding New Play

*Playwright Keri Healey was shortlisted for the 2012 Genius Award in Theater from The Stranger, Seattle's preeminent weekly newspaper: “This March, Seattle audiences got to watch Healey's already prodigious gifts as a writer take a jet-fueled leap forward with her play Torso. One part of it was loosely based on a real-life murder between siblings she knew growing up. The other part involved a woman (loosely based on herself) spending a night riding around with a taxi driver, trying to make sense of the murder while struggling with homicidal urges of her own. With Torso, Healey pulled the magical trick of turning people into monsters and back into people again. There's a word for that—empathy—but her depth of empathy, which informs all of her work, is rare in any writer. Midway through Torso, a sad-clown type of man walks into a living room, covered in blood, twitchily explaining how he'd just clumsily murdered his brother (over a relatively paltry sum of money). The man's sister grabs a plastic kiddie pool and hoses him off while he talks. And while we recoil from him—covered in his brother's blood, real Cain and Abel stuff—Healey carefully built the play so we genuinely feel bad for this dumb and pathetic murderer, slathered in gore. That is genius.”

Amy and Keira meet through unlikely and unfortunate circumstances and get drawn into a tentative and somewhat reluctant friendship. In the course of getting to know one another, the women tell each other funny stories about the men they’ve loved and/or slept with, all the while holding back some of the more painful memories of lost or never realized loves. Two women draw closer, but never commit to friendship or admit to their own fears until they absolutely need to.

"The best-written new piece I've seen; an intelligent, funny, and moving exploration of love, friendship, and sex, by Seattleite Keri Healey. This two-woman show depicts the friendship between a divorcée who can't get over her former husband and a party gal who can't find anyone worth the trouble it would take to settle down. Sure, this may be run-of-the-mill material, but Healey's writing is so beautiful, wise, and hilarious, it may as well be the first time this story has ever been told." (Rebecca Brown, The Stranger)

"Cherry Cherry Lemon is in part about how certain friendships offer a safety net at critical, transitional times, where one needn't worry about being judged or rejected for extreme displays of grief, lust or solitude. At its deepest, Keira and Amy's war-zone bond is a lifeline when emotions yield to something worse, to flashes of mortality and real dread that loss may not be an anomaly." (Tom Keogh, Seattle Times)

"Modulating between the inarticulate naturalism of dancefloor confessional and the heartbreaking precision of self-knowledge, Healey's script is both forceful and delicate, knowing and curious, wise without arrogance. It's also hilariously frank, but an undergirding sadness makes the laughs empathetic, and therefore all the heartier." (Sean Nelson, The Stranger)

Three individuals explore sex, connection, and loneliness within the cybersex world. Amy, a writer, turns to the internet to research what men really want, sexually speaking. Hidden behind a pseudonym, she surveys the invisible players in chat rooms about their love lives and eventually meets Andrew, a chatter to whom she finds herself attracted. As their relationship grows, Amy experiences two simultaneous and life-shifting events in her real life—the death of her best friend and the onset of a strange and debilitating disease inside her own body.

"Parrot Fever is moving, funny, erotic, and repulsive by turns—a paean to the lonely who cadge and sleaze their way through the seamy (and sometimes steamy) corners of the Internet. More deeply, it demonstrates that fantasy, in any medium, is often lubricated by pathetic truths, and, as Healey deftly illustrates, the babble of that inner universe cannot be silenced by turning off a computer." (Brendan Kiley, The Stranger)

"The miracle of Parrot Fever is that it's funny and observant without being suffocatingly cynical—there's a weird, welcome sense of dignity shared by all of these characters, even the ones who describe their sexual fantasies in purely frat-boy terms. It's the best new play in months. Just don't take a first date." (Chris Jensen, Seattle Weekly)

"Anyone who's pretended to be someone they're not as they chat through a keyboard (which has to be the majority of us) knows just how exciting it can be, and it turns out it's just as enjoyable to watch someone else go through it. With recognisable lines from the net (some you've even said yourself) coming from the other actors, Amy embarks on a journey including men, relationships and cybersex (be warned as some scenes contain virtual nudity and sex scenes). Go see this intricate but simple theatre: it's certainly worth a look." (Toni Main, db Magazine)

Sure that her fiance wants to kill her, socialite Julia Hampton hires down-on-his-luck gumshoe Sam Hardy to attend a swanky dinner party to investigate.

Phyllis doesn't have much time left. The life lessons she wants to teach her pre-teen daughter Gem are interrupted by Gem's visits to the local park where she meets a curious girl named Charlie and Charlie's guardian, Agnes.