Elizabeth Spreen / E. Hunter Spreen

A mystery play for the 21st century. Dumb Puppy spills out of the mind of K, who indulges in nostalgic recitations of childhood comfort foods and fanatical pie making. Intruding on her reverie is a collage of characters, from Marie Antoinette's salon at Versailles (including her many dogs) to Andy Warhol's Silver Factory to Johnny Depp's filmography, that jar K towards the grim reality about the disappearance of her family and neighbors.

Split the Stick walks through the fractured world of an American soldier returning home from Iraq. As Cody’s family descends into chaos, who steps up to help the troubled soldier truly come home?

Weaving together the inception of modern day Iraq by the British and its subsequent invasion by the United States, Split the Stick excavates the landscape of war and exposes its unintended consequences that often land squarely on the backs of individuals—soldiers and civilians alike. The first in a cycle of plays that trace the United States’s projection of power across the planet. The first part of the Dumb Puppy Performance Epic.

Split the Stick was one of five plays featured in Playwrights Foundation’s 2014 Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

A couple meets and falls in love. She’s an architect with a father who is a land developer. He’s an environmental lawyer. The full cycle of their relationship is revealed through scenes, answering machine messages, snippets of film, sound and lighting effects.

A thrilling, heartbreaking and exquisite investigation of love and belief, Care of Trees asks what happens when your partner embarks upon a path that you simply cannot follow and how do you care for something fragile and spectacular without understanding the rules?

Press:
In a more conventional story, characters can achieve something like redemption by serving as examples for others. Hans Christian Andersen's mermaid may dissolve into sea-foam at the end of her tale, but at least we've all learned to avoid consigning our voices to the neighborhood Sea Witch. Such lesson-learning is one of the benefits of inhabiting a fabulist realm, where every action carries a clear and lasting consequence. But that isn't the case with Daphne, and it isn't the case with Georgia. They've done nothing to deserve their fates; in their stories, the line connecting action to consequence simply doesn't exist. They deserve a storyteller more willing than Ovid to explore both the illogic and the permanence of their transformations.

Spreen is that kind of storyteller. In Care of Trees, she has created a tale that feels true to the experience of adulthood — which is to say that it's arbitrary and unjust, full of questions you never thought you'd ask, and none too generous with obvious answers. Somewhere out there, a laurel tree is nodding its approval. And this time she means it. - Chris Jensen, San Francisco Weekly

Elizabeth Hunter Spreen's daring new drama, Care of Trees, is what I call a "fearless" play. Its script takes audiences to unimaginable places in their minds while set designer Nina Ball provides the fluid landscape/mindscape required to support such a challenging emotional journey. The Shotgun Players' handsome multimedia production grabs audiences by the throat and takes them on one helluva challenging ride. - George Heymont, The Top 11 Events from San Francisco's 2011 Performances, Huffington Post, 2011

In the summer of 2001, Undine Swift, a commercial real estate developer, prepares to open a new resort and golf course on the shores of Lake Michigan. She is targeted by a radical environmental group whose credo is no compromise in the name of mother earth, and whose tactics are becoming increasingly violent. Six / eleven is an environmental morality play that delves into the worlds of capitalism and environmental radicalism, asking fundamental questions about the nature of dissent and what people will risk for what they believe.