In HITCH, Lane, a 36-year-old white man, picks up a young biracial hitchhiker in upstate New York. His casual fantasy of a hook-up with the young woman is blown up when he learns she is escaping from her mother’s abusive boyfriend, and her mother who believes whatever he tells her … and that she carries a rock for protection in close quarters (like his car). Dee’s assumptions about this nearly middle-aged white man who has picked her up are similarly altered over the course of the next 36 hours, as she learns that, far from being the geeky, wannabe ladies man that she presumed, Lane in fact is recovering from a devastating divorce as he drives to pick up his eight-year-old daughter in Terre Haute to take her home to Albany for the summer vacation.

The lies each has carefully told about him/herself to the other begin to unravel. Dee’s father didn’t die in a trucking accident; he abandoned her family. Lane’s philandering didn’t end his marriage; his wife’s did. Dee isn’t going to stay with relatives in Toledo; she’s planning to live on the streets as best she can there. Lane isn’t driving to pick up his daughter; he’s fleeing home having been unable to muster the nerve to face his ex-wife and pick the child up.

In the end, both need to face their demons: Dee, to return home and rescue the little sister she has left behind who she has learned is now being groomed for abuse by her step-father just as Dee was; Lane, to return and pick up his daughter who Dee has taught him is likely heartbroken. In the final scene, Lane helps Dee meet reconnect with her mother in a diner to discuss what to do, although nothing is certain. As the curtain falls, Lane sits alone in his car trying to decide which way to turn onto the interstate: west to home and defeat; or east to his daughter and growth.

In this dark comedy set in a small New England town at Halloween, Perdue finds a job in a place most young women wouldn’t even consider: the local graveyard. Bid, the taciturn, sexually ambiguous, female ex-Marine who runs the cemetery, hires Perdue because she’s moved by her plight: Perdue has come to town to live with her aunt while searching for her missing mother. Robbie, Bid’s assistant, a fatherless boy whose knowledge of manhood has been gleaned from the pages of men’s magazines like Maxim, launches a doomed campaign to seduce Perdue, culminating in a midnight picnic in the cemetery, but Perdue isn’t interested. Or entirely truthful, as Bid soon discovers when Perdue’s story begins to fall apart. Perdue is living in a homeless shelter; her mother died shortly before she arrived and is buried in the cemetery. Bid, seeing her own lost child in Perdue, offers her a place to stay. Perdue refuses, misinterpreting the offer as romantic, but is too lonely to entirely keep her distance from the others.

Perdue confides in Robbie that she has come, not to reconcile with her mother, but merely to see her face, which she doesn’t remember. Perdue hopes that her mother has left a photo of herself that will prove that she is the blond-haired woman in Perdue’s oldest memory, a woman whom Perdue knows loved her once. But there are no photos and Perdue must decide how far she’ll go to learn the truth about her mother. Bid must decide how much she’ll risk to stop her. By play’s end, the characters’ search for what they’ve lost – a mother, a father, a child – ends when they find each other instead.

In this dark comedy, Jack took to heart his second grade nun’s teaching 50 years ago that, no matter how evil a life he led, he could still go to heaven provided he made a perfect deathbed Confession. Now at the end of his crime-filled life, Jack lies dying, attended only by Bartholomew, his browbeaten son who despises him as much as he desires to be reconciled with him. Enter Fr. Gallagher, a soul-weary priest, about to encounter the most bizarre Confession of his career. Over the course of the play, Jack and Bartholomew struggle to come to terms with each other, with the help of Father Gallagher, who perseveres in the face of all odds … even after Jack shoots him. Father’s reward is the cold, comfortless monastic cell, far from the demands of the world, for which he has secretly longed. Jack’s reward may, or may not, be heaven. As for Bartholomew, by play’s end, he has begun to take the first steps from his prolonged adolescence into adulthood.

Good-hearted, world-wounded King has arrived at the Vermont summer home of his best friend, Albert, a Harvard professor of Victorian literature. Albert is so immersed in his period that he speaks only high Victorian English with a proper English accent and seeks to recreate 19th English country squire life right down to a butler named D’Israeli and the occasional duel. His beautiful wife, Julia, a linguistics professor herself, has proven unable to resist sharing either his accent or lifestyle.
King is uneasy, and with good reason. He is madly in love with Julia. Six years earlier, Albert had asked him to impregnate Julia in a Paris hotel room with the child Albert had been unable to give her. Albert’s plan seemed perfect … to Albert. He believed that, if King caught Julia unawares and revealed Albert’s sanction of the arrangement, her desire for a child would trump her qualms about infidelity until the deed was done. Albert did not fear further indiscretions, given the pair’s high moral character and sense of duty, not to mention King’s surpassing ugliness. But, stricken with conscience, King had called Julia in advance to obtain her consent. To his dismay, Julia rejected Albert’s proposal as far more morally complicated than he had considered. Instead, she offered to show King around Paris.
But fate took a hand … or was it a wing? King, an Antarctic marine biologist, carried with him to Julia’s room a vial of spray that male penguins emit as a prelude to love. When some accidentally spilled, King discovered it to be a female human aphrodisiac of staggering efficacy, turning the proper Julia into a raging lustress from whom King was unable to escape (not that he tried very hard). Unfortunately, the handkerchief Kind used to wipe up the spill remained behind with the dazed Julia.
Nine months later, Julia presented Albert with a son whom they christened Ernest. Given the timing and the couple’s previous infertility, Albert, racked by doubt as to the boy’s parentage and doubtful of King’s story that he hadn’t been able to go through with the plan, asked King to Vermont to finally learn the truth. His characterization of the weekend as merely a long overdue reunion of best friends rings false to King – especially when Albert begins discharging firearms in his general direction. Matters are complicated when Julia rediscovers the hanky. Unaware of its power, she uses it to stifle her hay-fever sneezes, then finds herself lustfully groping a guilty, but game, King. They finally confess the truth to Albert, and all is well. Until Roquefort, the Parisian waiter from the hotel café arrives, seeking Julia and his son. It seems that, after King left her room that day, Julia went downstairs for a croque-monsieur. Still under the influence of the penguins, she ordered more than a ham sandwich from Roquefort. One sneeze later, a horrified Albert and King discover the pair roiling on the couch.
Determined to discover the father, the men squabble over whom the boy is most like. Unhelpfully, he is exactly like Julia and not much like any of them. Julia then confesses that the three deliverymen she encountered outside her room upon leaving Roquefort may have carried the fateful seed – in the form of deliveries from three of England’s leading sperm banks. The truth seems more remote than ever, until it suddenly arrives in the form of a DNA test secretly ordered by Albert. Julia begs Albert not to open the envelope, fearing that, if the results disappoint him, he will change towards Ernest and herself. Albert finally relents, noting his beloved Victorians’ penchant for secrets, unknown parentage and, above all, duty. They toss the results into the woodstove. But King, who must know the truth, saves the letter upon their exit. The couple soon comes racing back for it, having realized, as good Victorians will, that their true duty is to learn the truth, which, like blood, will out anyway.
King proves the biological father, but realizes that Albert, who has raised Ernest, is his true father, and that Julia can never be his. Albert and King accept their fates manfully and the three embrace. Julia foretells that their path will be difficult as they, like so many must these days, attempt to reinvent family, but believes that, if they tread that path together honestly, all may yet be well. A disappointed King opens the front door to take a walk. He is confronted by Ernest, who remains off-stage. The boy, fascinated by penguins, asks if he can join King to hear more. Suppressing his usual urge to flee human interaction, King offers the boy his hand and steps through the front door and into life.

Martin, 12, is a small, smart boy in a school where both conditions attract danger equally. Nor is home a respite; his mother’s abusive boyfriend, Davis, sees to that. Martin’s one friend, Phoebe, who is also 12 and also a target for lunchroom bullies, provides some comfort, despite towering over Martin physically if not intellectually. Life holds little promise of improvement until a pooka, a mythical Celtic fairy who can assume the shape of any animal or person, appears to Martin one day. Initially, Peter seems a good friend and one capable of bullying Martin’s bullies right back. But whether he means Martin well, ill, or indeed anything, and whether the possibilities he presents for Martin will lead to a happier life or disaster, are only made clear in the play’s terrifying final scene.

In this magical realism drama with comedy, family patriarch Brian has fallen ill with cancer. His son, Sean, has dropped out of college and returned to Cambridge to care for him. Complicating rather than assisting Sean’s efforts is his sister, Patty, who lives nearby but does not do well with the sick – or the living, for that matter. While children and father all hope for the reconciliation that has escaped them in the past, the strains of Brian’s illness and close quarters instead push them even further apart. Brian’s anti-Semitism, sexism and homophobia are bad enough, but to his children, his refusal to accept them for who they are is his greatest failing. What’s worse, Brian’s complaints about the disappointments of his life, the greatest being Sean, infuriates both his children: Sean for obvious reasons; Patty, because, even when listing his disappointments, Brian hardly notices her.

Then Sean discovers the hoard of pain killers with which Brian intends to kill himself before the pain of his illness can overwhelm him, in part to spare his children the horrors of a prolonged deathwatch. While they ponder whether to let their father go ahead with his plan, or to intervene, Brian awkwardly tries to make amends, with dismal results, whether teaching Patty about baseball as she claims she always wanted him to, or by giving Sean advice about his former girlfriend. What his children want is to tell him in death what he never told them in life: that he loves them. For his part, Brian struggles to rise above the cynicism and bitterness of his life to reach out to his children. In this he is aided by frequent visits from the Virgin Mary, who may or may not be a Percocet-induced figment of Brian’s imagination. In the end, the only way Brian can find to end a life lived at loggerheads with the ones he loves most are a pair of two-edged parting gifts to his children: a note to Sean and the choice of Patty to be with him when he dies. At play’s end, Sean concludes that these gifts were the best Brian could do, but both his children must decide whether it was enough.

Dusk is that time of day when, “if you didn’t know what time it was, you wouldn’t know which is going to win, the light or the darkness.” So says the Nana, matriarch of an Irish Catholic family in Cambridge, Massachusetts struggling to decide whether to accept the Church’s settlement offer or go to trial over a priest’s sexual assault of the family’s youngest son. Over the course of one day, the family must face truth and lies; faith and disillusionment; and betrayal, forgiveness, and redemption on their journey toward peace.

Two political prisoners. One cell. A regime fighting for its life. Who can you trust when the only rule is, trust no one?

To fulfill her father’s final wish, a grieving daughter makes a pilgrimage to the place loved best: his favorite bar.

Their painting moved to a new room at the Louvre, Mary and the Archangel Gabriel find their relationship threatened by a woman with an inscrutable smile.

An innocent Russian gecko-sex-research space voyage turns potentially deadly … and lucrative.

A man learns that the young hitchhiker he has picked up is not at all what she seemed … at least to him.

Jello shots, heartbreak, and Japanese Schoolgirl Night are all on tap at the local townie bar that lies just outside the gates of the prestigious women’s college. What could possibly go wrong?

Two people come to on a life boat adrift on the ocean with no idea how they got there. Someone must be out there looking for them … right?

A witch’s stepdaughter defeats her and marries her true sweetheart … well, after she figures out which of her sweethearts he is.

Tim and Hope, a young couple, try to come up with the perfect simile for Hope’s spectacularly pregnant belly. In the process, they reveal their deepest fears about parenthood, and their greatest hopes.

Joyce is on the cusp of many things – a doctoral program, her fiancé moving in and turning 30 to name a few – but all she wants to do is hit the pause button. When Luke discovers the mysterious safe in her basement, his determination to open it is matched only by her determination to keep him out.

A wounded Yankee and a wounded Confederate find themselves trapped in no-man’s land, in a desperate struggle to survive against each other … and themselves.

A runner prepares for a Thanksgiving Day run to escape his family.

A huckster and his apprentice hawk their wares on the midway … and ponder what they are really selling.

A writer desperate to save everything he has ever written. A vicious computer virus intent on eating it. Only a Zen IT guru can save the writer … but only if the writer allows him to heal the writer’s soul before healing his hard drive.

Two squirrels contemplate a peanut-butter-baited trap … and the promise of an answer to life’s deepest mystery.

An Irish immigrant and an Irish-American learn that they belong to two peoples divided by a common history.

A dog must confront his darkest fear … and bacon bits.

In this new fairy tale, a golden-haired boy is happy to divide his village with rumor and innuendo about the new family in town … until only they can save him.

When his girlfriend dumps him for no apparent reason, one dude’s search for understanding leads him inevitably to the bong … and then the apple. Not just any apple: rather, one who, alone among his mates in the fruit bowl, has not only consciousness but wisdom beyond measure. All seems well until fate, in the form of another stoner beset with the munchies and bereft of Doritos, takes a hand ….

Two Florida librarians have to decide which books to ban from their high school library … and whether to keep their jobs.

In a vast Amazon warehouse, man and robot struggle for dominance.

Two fast-food co-workers, waiting for the layoff ax to fall, have to choose between the job they need, and the friend they want to keep.

A teenager needs to talk to her best friend about the surprise road trip she’s on, but can’t tell where she’s going, who’s she’s with … or why.

A fraternity pledge and a bored student working the checkout learn that they have more in common than they think.

A captured rebel commander and the regime’s interrogator parry and thrust in a world where the lies are as convincing as the truth.

In this highly stylized comedy, a father and son find a way to come together … and to get past the loss they share.

When Lexi takes her brother’s treat, the family justice system kicks into action. But does Mom have another agenda?

Karl Marx, a secular Jew who nevertheless adores Christmas, has escaped to London after the revolutions of 1848, the same London in which Charles Dickens is setting his beloved A Christmas Carol. Marx himself is a writer, struggling to write Das Kapital and blocked by his failure as a revolutionary leader and his inability to figure out what circumstances are necessary to trigger the world-changing upheaval that he is convinced is historically inevitable. At Christmastime, he encounters a poor London family, the Cratchits, struggling to survive crushing poverty in general and one Ebenezer Scrooge in particular. But these are not the long-suffering, morally pristine Cratchits of Dickens’ novel; rather, they are something darker, and yet paradoxically somehow more human.

Will they inspire Karl to write Das Kapital, his masterpiece? Or will he give up and take the job as a simple railroad clerk with which he is flirting as an obscure but sure, way out of his poverty? A Christmas Karl is play for our times, exploring, as Dickens did, the flaws of capitalism; the plight of the poor; the suffering of the ill and resourceless; and the ugly fear of immigrants. It could hardly be more timely than today when income inequality, now fueled by a pandemic, is increasingly turning America into two nations: one wealthy and the other just struggling to survive. These issues are foremost in the play, even while it retells the story in a much different way by depicting the adventures of the characters off-stage, much as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, did and providing a Marxian reinterpretation of Scrooge’s final-scene change of heart.

Santa pauses on his rounds for a snack … and comes face-to-face with his darkest secret.

Ethan Allen defies God and Man, not to mention a pandemic, by drunkenly, unlawfully and blasphemously receiving the smallpox inoculation condemned by the Puritan Church as against God’s will during an outbreak in 1765.

Two homeless people struggle over a panhandling spot and their need for connection in a time of pandemic.

When their cleaner messes up, an affluent couple has to decide exactly what they’re entitled to.

When their pilot ignores that their plane has caught fire, three airline passengers debate what to do: An allegory for the Age of Trump.

A woman is on the hunt for coffee and men. Not necessarily in that order.