A re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream weaving a conservative Christian community, a commune of Radical Queer Faeries, trailer park boys, and art school drop outs into a theatrical event for today.

The play follows the original, nearly scene for scene and launches straight into the action. Language-driven and embracing the setting of the Appalachian, Midsouthern states, we follow the lovers, here Sandra and Mia on their escape to the promise of Richmond and a more liberal community. Their christian community’s rejection of their partnership leads them to the woods where they collide with Duke and Hicks. Duke is roiling over his ex Melli’s choice to raise their son in a Radical Queer Faerie commune and with his buddy Hicks (and a knowledge of psychedelics) he’s planning a humiliation and revenge.

Amidst this, the Rude Mechanicals, here a performance art ensemble, are putting together a show for the Mayor’s wedding. The open call for acts assuring their first public audience - and an opportunity to launch their vision.

Music, dance, spectacle and the magic of the original seeps into a new play for contemporary audiences (and artists).

Persephone leans into a cave and is kidnapped by Hades. Maybe though she was seduced, she may have been ready to grow up, to run off with a lover. Demeter was so miserable that she stopped nourishing the earth, crops failed and people starved. Demeter pleads for the return of her daughter, Zeus agrees, but she’s already eaten food from the underworld. Zeus decrees her time will be spent. Six months above, six months below, and the Earth finds a balance of the seasons.

Demeter, not satisfied with a mere half a year, pursues Hades. She instigates her followers to mine the earth of its riches, its minerals and its fuel. The more they release, the more her power grows, the longer she can keep Persephone with her - and the longer summer reigns. Persephone, after centuries, was happy with her life, half the year with her doting husband, half with her mother. She pleads with her mother to relax - to let her go, she has a family down there with Hades. Demeter refuses. She spurs on developments to extract whatever can be extracted from the depths of the earth to wring the life from the rival for her daughter’s love. She succeeds. Oil, gas, fracking, her efforts destroy Hades and return Persephone to her mother. Demeter will keep the earth warm all year round - she will defy the gods and she will have her daughter with her forever.

A new myth for a hotter world.

The over-achieving daughter, Stevie, returns home and falls through the ice. Her PhD has stalled as she witnesses its subject, the Cryosphere, disappear due to our warming climate. Coming home to the suburbs of Washington DC seeking a respite, she finds instead her mother and younger sister frozen in their own isolation. Overwhelmed by her sense of impotence to change anything globally Stevie's attempts to impact her world locally seem equally unmanageable - until actions are taken - a kiss, a swim, a gun-shot - a connection.

The play opens in the parking lot of a disintegrating motel on the outskirt of the district. A group of agents put a plan in motion to locate Milla, a daughter of a dissident, reported to be dead. In one of the rooms she is being secretly kept by Clyde, one of the agents now charged with finding her. She is often addled from drug use, but is kindling the will to ask the questions no one is asking - why, who's orders, and where else could they go? The play pits coarse dialogue, familiar archetypes, and slapstick violence against heightened language and moments of serenity to ask serious questions about violence, individual agency and belief.

In the Spring of 1968 on a rural college campus in the mid-west, Gracie dreams of Bobby Kennedy and he dreams back at her. A play that looks at a moment that shook america through the eyes of one young woman and wonders how her choices ripple out to the present day.

A man receives a terminal diagnosis. The Doctor sends him to Spence. Spence is a specialist, not in the direct treatment of the disease, but in the oblique caring for the person. The man feels that he knows when the disease began, when the cells turned against him and he starts a journey west to try to correct his mistake.

Along the way he chokes on a sandwich.

He is saved by Bickie and Jess, teenagers running from a very bad thing. They decide to travel together.

A play about who saves who and how.

About the unrelenting movement of lives and the death that ends it.

About going west by any means necessary.

To be performed in a small space, ideally a basement, a backroom. Someplace safe. THE STRAY DOG takes its inspiration from the St. Petersburg cabaret of the same name where Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandlestam, Mayakovsky and others read their poetry in the early 1900s. This play takes place in the present, amidst the ceremonies of a group devoted to the adoration of these poets on a night when their priestess is teetering on the brink. A theatrical event balanced between the real and the imagined about what makes the heart sing - and what makes that stop.