Tom Horan

In the Indiana Dunes, there is a legend of murdered woman who's ghost comes back to relive her happiest moments, skinny dipping in the lake. Diana of the Dunes tells the story of a young couple, Joe and Ash, who find themselves on a hike gone wrong, only to receive help from a pair of eccentric locals - Diana and her husband. The couple realizes too late that Diana and her Husband are not what they seem. Their only hope is to find a way home before getting caught in Diana's cycle of best and worst moments.

In 1906, at the turn of a virgin century, at the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden, in front of hundreds of witnesses, one man shot another over the virtue of his wife. But this was no ordinary woman. Evelyn Nesbit was America’s first “it” girl—a child celebrity, whose image graced the cover of magazines, advertisements, and fine art. The murderer was Harry K. Thaw, the newly married millionaire playboy; the victim was Stanford White, renowned New York architect, who had designed the building where he died. The resulting court case became, in a phrase the press would use for the first time, “The Trial of the Century.” Savage City charts the secrets behind the scandal, exploring the power a woman has over her future.

The Brain Thief is (very) loosely based on a real event that happened in Indianapolis in 2013: A young man broke into a medical museum and stole brains to sell on eBay.

In the early 1950s, Margret Sanger is at the end of career as an activist for women’s rights. Yet throughout it all she had never been able to achieve her secret hope of creating a “magic tablet” that would be cheap, easy, and allow woman to turn off and on her ability to have a child. Sanger makes one last effort to achieve her dream. She enlists Katherine McCormick, a former suffragist and wealthy widow to finance the project, forms a tentative alliance with Goodwin Pincus – a disgraced hormone scientist, and John Rock a Roman Catholic gynecologist, whose reluctant participation lent the project a sheen of acceptability. Together these four attempt to navigate a problem that seems scientifically impractical, financially unfeasible, requires testing medicine with strong side effects on healthy young women, and necessitates the participation of skeptical pharmaceutical companies to produce a pill that would be illegal according to 30 states and the federal law. We many all know of the birth control, but do we know what was risked to create it?

The Giantmaker takes one of the most famous hoaxes in United States History and spins a larger than life theatrical tale. After an atheist, George Hull, gets into an argument with a Methodist preacher, he decides to get revenge. When an apparent 10ft tall petrified man is unearthed on a quiet farm in upstate New York, Mr. Hull hopes to trick the bible literalists who believe in giants into paying to see it, yet he fails to realize how this oddity will capture the imagination of the scientific community, the media and the American public.

During a rainy stretch of days, Mary Shelley creates what would become her most famous novel, Frankenstein. The play tackles this event with all due irreverence, coloring in margins of history books with its portrayal of husband Percy Shelly, step sister Claire, host Lord Byron and his Doctor. The play unearths a figurative understanding of creation, unsettling notions of God, Death, Art and Waldorf Salads – Mary believes the creature of her story is alive and responsible for all the real tragedies in her life.

The term “Typhoid Mary,” signifying a person who knowingly spreads disease, has become common place. Yet the tale of the Mary Mallon, the cook who inspired the name, is lesser known.

In 1906, Dr. George Soper and Dr. Sara Baker discovered that Mary, a working-class immigrant, caused several breakouts of typhoid. They labeled her an “asymptomatic carrier” of Typhoid, a designation that medicine was still struggling to understand. With no trial, the medical authority locked Mary away for 3 years, then unceremoniously let go on the condition she not cook ever again. A few years later she was found cooking at the scene of a typhoid outbreak at a maternity hospital, forcing her into quarantine for the rest of her life.

The play TYPHOID MARY, funnels the story through Mary’s persecuted eyes and the two very different doctors who sought to understand her condition. At heart, the play digs into the battle of a Religious versus Medical understanding of cleanliness and the people caught in the middle. Her discovery as well as her subsequent treatment by Dr. Soper and Dr. Baker, unfolds in front of a backdrop of changing understanding sickness and morality, which are complicated by notions of power, gender, and class.

When Emma was a little girl, she heard ghost stories about her neighbors Walter and Millie Burke - how the couple filled their home with strange things, which drove them mad. Years have passed and Emma finds herself the owner of this house that has sat abandoned for years. She discovers, among the jars of buttons and tubs of forks, a box full of cassette tapes filled with secrets of Walter and Millie. 


Acid Dolphin Experiment tackles the life of Dr. John C Lilly, a midcentury American Neuroscientist famous for exploring the nature of consciousness, using isolation tanks, dolphin communication, and psychedelic drugs... sometimes in combination... and frequently on himself. As a scientist, he risked his career, his relationships, and his sanity, to decipher the subjective experiences often dismissed as "mere hallucinations."