Eric Marlin

A mother publishes a harrowing wartime memoir. Her daughter tries to reconcile the recollections. A stranger enters their lives. And somewhere else, two actors make a movie. A new play about adapting humanity’s most horrific stories.

For more about the project, including a response by critic and cultural historian Alisa Solomon, visit https://baryshnikovarts.org/journal/eric-marlin-ilana-khanin/

​The nation has never been healthier. Crime is down. Streets are clean. Civility reigns. But out of the corner of your eye, you might catch a glimpse of the men keeping things orderly. In a series of brief, enigmatic scenes, two women take us into the heart of a nation that has been disciplined by violence,

Within the horrifying chambers of the Christian imagination, four Jews chart the psychological and sexual violence of internalized anti-Semitism. A revenge adaptation of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.

Susannah's father has just died. But she doesn't have time to grieve. She's been called to Romania to help an unnamed company expand into international markets. Trapped in a world of corporate absurdity, Susannah's grief grows more distant as she burrows into her job. Meanwhile, the city outside is beginning to look oddly like the office inside. AirSpace is a comedy about the cultural consequences of globalization.

Conceived with Lila Rachel Becker

The year is 1500. The Catholic conquest of the Iberian peninsula is almost complete. The Inquisition touches every corner of newly unified Spain. The Ottoman Empire is battling for global power. And Captain Ben-Zion Palachi, the Rabbi Pirate, has gathered an intrepid crew of Jews, Muslims, and New Christians to find a legendary treasure of the British Empire: the Golden Chessboard. Amidst these adventures, a stowaway named Chana makes a bid for the kind of power she cannot find on land. A swashbuckling play with music set against a rapidly shifting world haunted by the ghosts of the past, The True Chronicles of Ben–Zion Palachi resurrects the historical phenomena of Jewish pirates to explore the stories we never hear.

Six people gather for a meeting of the minds. The lights go out. The smell of rot permeates the air. The ghosts come out to taunt us. "Denial" is a horror play about humanity's worst impulses.

Two bros watch the dissident Antigone buried alive on national television. The spectacle inspires a misguided attempt to capture her martyrdom in art, as they glibly repurpose her story in search of some truth about the nature of suffering.

Formerly titled "The Antigones: A Tragedy in Flux."

Three daughters gather for their mother’s passing. Ancient family wounds are reopened as the audience, blindfolded for the play, eavesdrops on these women’s conversations.

​Two actors work their way through an old melodrama. It's not going very well. They can't figure out what works and what doesn't. They burrow further and further in. They recreate and destroy. They rehearse again. A new work emerges from the old. But is it any better?

Irina wants Moscow. Masha wants Vershinin. Olga wants peace. And in a room that is not in Imperial Russia, a man who is not Chekhov frets about his windowsill, his mother, and the longings of three fictional sisters. The sisters, meanwhile, keep slipping out of their theatrical world, in this phantasmagoric collision between Chekhov’s grief-stricken past and our grief-stricken present.

As a child, Laney terrorized her sister Elena. But Laney grew up, found God, learned she was possessed by a demon, and had it exorcised by her priest. News of this should please her estranged sister Elena, a devout Catholic herself. But Elena's old wounds won’t heal so easily, and demons never truly leave without a proper fight.

Everyone’s been hooking up with each other in the meadows. The Wooer loves the Wooed. The City Slicker loves the Wooer. The Wooed’s not into either of them. And the Lady of the Moon is tired of all these dumbstruck lovers. An exploration of the erotic liberation found in pastoral literature, "Pastoral Play" is a pastiche comedy about queer desire and horny shepherds.

The Queen is in distress; the capital of her kingdom has burned down. The Architect has been taken prisoner, and her son has been taken away. The Architect is drafting the plans for the city as fast as she can. But it’s difficult to work with so much screaming in the palace. Inspired by the Argentinian grotesco criollo tradition, Kingdom Crosses Over is an examination of torture and power--and just how terrifying cello music can be.

Sixteen-century Germany. Europe is in the midst of the Protestant Reformation. The nuns of the Convent of St. Cecilia are preparing for the performance of a choral mass to honor the Feast of Corpus Christi. At the same moment, a group of Lutheran iconoclasts have arrived in town to smash the convent to pieces. And yet the woman refuse to flee. The resulting catastrophe provokes an intimate and comic investigation of personal faith.

Jess's pet goat Blackberry has been inexplicably murdered and beheaded. As she burrows into her grief, she begins to hear the song of Blackberry’s head crying out to her. In a world that doesn’t take children's pain seriously, and where grief is too expensive for her family’s means, Jess must grapple with her loss alone as she looks for Blackberry’s head.

Jonah’s been running from God, ever since escaping the belly of the whale. He can’t seem to forget his ex-lover Isaiah as he waits in a rainy train station somewhere in Moscow. And waiting with him is a sad young woman named Anna Karenina, who has her own train to catch. "The Book of Jonah" is the story of the heartbroken Jonah and Anna as they begin to grope their way towards a sense of logic in their sorrows.

A woman from a modest Mormon household announces to her family that she has decided to become a god. Husband wants to support her. Son doesn't want to know much more. And Daughter just wants her to shut up and say grace. As Wife begins her ascension, the family slowly unspools. Meanwhile, the whole house is slowly flooding. Scenes of Ascending is a comedic fable about ambition, theology and oceans.

In 1542, a model sits for a painter and is never paid. Over the centuries, the painting's reputation grows. In the present day, the model's descendant demands the money her ancestor never received. A two-hander about art, power, and whether or not the world needs to burn.

Bomb are dropping. Sparrows are taking over. Spacesuits won't save us. An elegy in five parts, "War/Time" meditates on the end of humanity across millions of years.

Four weavers, through a series of games, begin performing versions of a life unshackled from their looms. Erotic desire and revolutionary impulse mingle and coalesce, and the beginnings of a rebellion start to bubble underneath. Loosely based on the Luddite movement, 'Neath Shuttle Clicks is a found-text play that is built on the sounds and words from eighteenth-century looming life.

Rene and Georgette Magritte are making breakfast. Outside their kitchen is a cowboy, slowly approaching. Over a few dozen cups of coffee, husband and wife try to avoid discussing their recent infidelities.

Elliot has brought his boyfriend home to meet his mother. Mom has brought home her new lover, a BDSM-obsessed Russian witch. Fights ensure over a lamb dinner that does not exist.

Deep in a Russian forest, the witch Baba Yaga is attempting to have a quiet evening in. She won't have much rest when she gets a visit from a young girl named Vera, who is obsessed with the stories of the ancient sorceress.

Two men fall in and out of love many times during the course of an 60 years relationship, which takes them from a youthful encounter in a park to a failed life together in Switzerland. Zurich is a ten-minute play that track this relationship in brief, elusive vignettes.

A CPA drones on about his unfinished masterpiece. A eighteenth-century woman scribbles her patriarchy-smashing masterpiece by candlelight. A man destroys his marriage for his art. "Seven Scenes of Writers Writing Writerly" gleefully rips through the worst clichés of artistic genius. Created in collaboration with Lila Rachel Becker.

Two women chat during an unbearably long scene change. Chit chat leads to a plan to burn down the theater.

When a newly made golem runs away from home, he goes on a journey across the land and under the sea to learn about accountability and self-control. An educational play for kids grades 3-6, commissioned by CLIMB Theatre.