Erin Marie Panttaja

If you have to go there is the story of intentional, chosen family and the interface of that with the kind of family that is thrown together by circumstance. It is the story of three Thanksgivings and the fires that tear apart their communities. Cora and Adele have been neighbors for years when a fire burns through their city, destroying Adele’s home. Adele chooses to stay and try to rebuild in the ashes.

Preapocalyptica is about a fundamental disconnect: how can we live with horrible things, with a view that the world might end, and soon, within our or our children’s lifetimes, and still continue? How can we believe the news is dire, and that a solution may not occur, and yet continue to raise our children? How can we find ways to meaningfully contribute to change? How can we combat the meaningless (and figure out what it is). How do we go on in the face of destruction?

An ethnographer is interviewing a long distance trucker to build the future of autonomous trucks.

Software engineer Maddy is 20 weeks pregnant. At a routine doctor’s appointment she is put on bed rest for the rest of her pregnancy, just before her husband Adam is scheduled to go to China on business. Maddy weathers the next few months with the help of her mother and a friend, but has to cope with the loss of her professional identity, her health, and her independence, all for a fragile hope that the baby will be born okay.

Katya's Opuscule tells the story of a strong, mature woman trying to find her place in the world. Katya's story is told as a combination of present action, flashbacks to her past, and stories (the opuscules of the title) told by her future self. The stories step outside of the narrative of the piece and use puppetry as spectacle to show glimpses of her past and future. Use of three actors to play the lead and one actor to play the significant men in her life emphasize the parallels she is trying to escape from. Katya's Opuscule was written for 6-8 actors with some double casting, and has not been produced.

Birth is primal. It is touching and hilarious and dangerous and one of the most purely animal experiences that we still go through in this age of concrete and cell phones. It is the first thing each of us did in our lives. I have twin daughters. When I was pregnant with them, Tawawert was an image that came to me again and again. I love her place as a household goddess. I love her juxtaposition of the mundanity of pregnancy and childbirth with the weightiness of life and death. I also love her physicality: the hippopotamus is ponderous and unwieldily, and yet hippos kill 500 people a year, and are one of the most dangerous animal threats to human beings.

10-minute musical based on the Misner and Smith song "A Different Way to Tell Him I Love You." Janelle decides to protest the war even though her husband is currently deployed.

It's like Uber. For fruit.