Patty Kim Hamilton

In a renowned surreal pain clinic, seven women navigate an eternal cycle of therapies, conversations, and mundane activities, attempting to alleviate their persistent, excruciating and chronic pain. Time takes on a peculiar rhythm. Very little changes. The aging female body emerges as a central motif, explored in its complexities. The play meditates on the thin veil between this life and the next, between physical and psychic pain. Grounded in real conversations, bureaucratic clinic questionnaires, and chronic pain therapies, the play weaves in choral passages, doctor’s assessments, poetry, ensemble scenes, and performative nature images, posing profound questions about relief and the journey through pain.

Re: Jane Doe is a play about intimacy, consent, and our language around boundaries, assault, and healing. Examining the current state of discourse after #metoo, the text uses personal stories from a myriad of characters to highlight the universal experiences of negotiating needs and desires. One through-line (Jane Doe and John Doe) follows a woman after an assault, as she tries to communicate, experience and process her closest relationships and her own relationship to herself.

Jae returns home to the small town of Sisters, Oregon, to find her Mother (Umma) and sister (Luna), each preoccupied with their own emotional worlds. As relationships and mental health begin to unravel, the family is forced to confront their memories and ghosts in an attempt to reconstruct their past. Truth and fiction become blurred as it becomes clear that no one’s memory is fully trustworthy. When a new resident of the town enters Jae’s life, assumptions and fears become uncovered. A reflection on memory, daughter-sister-motherhood and Korean-American women, this play questions the blurriness between culture, love, abuse, and madness.

when it hurts // this body is just a house is about two children in an adult relationship. It is about falling in and out of love, the childlike experience that is intimacy, and the pain that can accompany this sort of experience. It is a reflection on gender queerness, loneliness, mental illness and drug abuse. It is a meditation on dependence, distance and care. Throughout the course of the play we see the fragmented memories of the growth and unraveling of Shoelace and K's relationship, playing in and around the tree that is their home and their world.