Olivia Facini

To pay the bills while wading through NCLEX prep, aspiring gynecological nurse Nora is stuck waxing an interminable lineup of coochie at her local full-service salon. In any other context, she’d love to be drowning in it, but this job is bleak… until she meets and falls for her client Lila, who loves Paramore and hates bachelorette parties (she must be gay, right?!). But when Nora’s coworker, wingman, and shopping-addicted friend Kevin encourages her to finally pony up and ask Lila out, Nora still can’t make herself do it. Kevin, after all, is one to talk about bravery—he still hasn’t worked up the courage to come out to his super religious family.

As if that weren’t enough, Nora’s dad has just returned for game night after a long time away; Lila’s mom is almost at her goal weight of feather; and Kevin’s uncle Terry might let him spend Christmas in Boca if he gets off the naughty list. Everyone’s dreaming of the life they want, and everyone’s fantasizing about Santa (Santasizing).

“Slick” is a Christmas-themed queer romantic comedy with a dark underbelly: the quippy banter of one scene gives way to the brooding, repetitious monologues of the next; characters become trapped in their self-made prisons of language, routine, and denial; love masks lust, self-care disguises self-loathing, and cheerful family reunions obscure inherited harmful behaviors, as three Zillennials juggle their strange relationships with the elders who taught them, as best they could, how to live with others—and themselves.

At Chocophiles, an Outer Cape Cod chocolate shop, owners Janet and Bonnie work to resist a takeover by their former mentee and employee, now rival, Nata. Their son, Benji, disillusioned with coding, is studying to be a rabbi—but he’s distracted by Lucija, Chocophiles’ Croatian seasonal worker. Love is in the air, but sharks are in the water. How will they EVER make enough inventory for Provincetown Pride?!

While attending her first MLB Characters Convention, Mel engages in quippy verbal showdowns, preposterous games of physical endurance, and a healthy dose of magical realist hijinks with an oddly matched group of her fellow characters and two women looking to change the game. Wacky and ultra-caffeinated—imagine the fusion of an ESPN blooper reel and a queer(er) Wizard of Oz—this play sizzles with nonstop jokes, pop culture references, and sassy PowerPoint slides that communicate God’s Word.

A unique blend of Tom Stoppard’s urbanity and Letterkenny’s fast-talking folksiness, Grrrcadia is a brainy, zany, and quick-witted comedy about succeeding as a woman in a patriarchal society, processing environmental collapse, and dealing with high-strung personalities (both thespian and ursine).

The play takes place in Maine’s Acadia National Park, where the high summer season is in full swing. Visitors come from decently far and pretty wide to see sweeping views of the Atlantic from craggy stretches of winding coastline. But beneath the idyllic façade, the park froths with tensions, intrigues, and machinations among an overworked park manager, an eccentric theater director obsessed with the park’s cultural programming, a local lawyer turned amateur actor, two bumbling park rangers, and an insecure, aggressive, and slightly neurotic black bear who’s pissed.

Magnificent follows Maggie, a magician experiencing a crisis of faith in magic and her own abilities. The play interweaves Maggie’s fast-paced, rom-com-style contemporary storyline with a slower, melodrama-infused nineteenth-century plot that haunts her: the story of Elfred, Maggie’s great-great grandfather and fellow magician, who tries to prove himself to those who believe he’s a fraud—even though he might be exactly that. Maggie’s ex (another magician), best friend, agent, parents, and barista mostly try to help but mainly end up exacerbating her crisis—though everyone, including Maggie, comes to realize that she’s the primary obstacle standing in her way. Wrestling with her inheritance of magic, secrets, and self-deception, Maggie tries to find a way to live into her family’s legacy on her own terms.

While Elfred’s story follows a linear trajectory, Maggie’s strand jumps atemporally between different moments during a twenty-year span. The piece’s style and structure have been deeply influenced by film, particularly off-beat rom-coms of the early 2000s (for Maggie’s strand) and gothic black-and-white films, especially Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician (1958), (for Elfred’s late-nineteenth century strand).

Sweet but not sappy, pragmatic but not pessimistic, funny but not fake, this short play explores the bonds of Millennial femme friendship, complete with Trader Joe’s recommendations, dating talk, and self-discovery via the CUNY Library Sciences program. As Nietzsche would say, “Swipe right to life.”

A brisk and eventful one-act: Tensions come to a boiling point as six high-strung office colleagues fight for a coveted assignment and clash over their divergent views and priorities. (The “colleagues” are essential oils, and they “work” in a plastic-lined makeup bag in a drawer in a house in the suburbs. But they have feelings, too.)

With fast-paced dialogue between Fargo-esque Midwesterners (the nice ones) relying on pop culture-infused one-liners, elaborate animal analogies, and numerous references to a controversial amusement park, Cross Plains tells the story of unlikely friendships between a group of oddballs from the “used car capital of the mid-central Midwest.” It’s also a story about feeling lost and feeling stuck—and about realizing that it’s ok to feel that way.

A common mystery perplexes all of these characters: everyone in town seems to have lost something of importance at Soap ‘n Suds Laundromat, the beating heart of the town’s social scene. While trying to recover their lost items, the characters confront their own (mixed) desires to get out of town, realizing in the process the depth and emotional complexity of their ties to a place that, for them, will never be a fly-over zone.

In response to overwhelmingly positive feedback from our audiences of Made in Vermont and their excited questions about “what’s next” for these characters, we wrote the prequel to the play, dubbed The Beforetimes because it takes place at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, a time of Zoom tutorials, existential crises, and the birth of a business idea that would forever change our favorite group of wacky Vermonters.

The IRS has begun an audit of McOverall Farms, a dairy farm that has recently rebranded itself as “Woke Milk,” Vermont’s foremost producer of pea milk, which, as we all know, is vegan, protein-rich, and woke as hell. In a series of interviews, IRS auditor Alicia Barnes converses and contends with the zany brains behind Woke Milk: farmer, All-American spelling bee champ, savant, and Old Testament prophet J.D. McOverall Mulligan; his social media consultant and actor-on-hiatus John “Zsa Zsa Bling Bling” Smith; and their accountant, the notorious Linda G. Blatt.

Drawing on nine months of private lessons with one of my weirdest and sweetest students, Baby Trashcan is a comedic two-hander about a tutor-student bond.

Bert, a man of sixty-five, has been estranged from his brother Henry for twenty-five years—since their explosive argument on the day of their mother’s funeral. After a quarter-century of silence, Henry leaves a message on Bert’s phone asking to speak with him. This event, combined with the anniversary of his mother’s death and a sudden announcement from his best friends, leaves Bert feeling shaken and confused. While his wife, Louise, does her utmost to support him, in the end Bert must come to terms with the past in his own way.