Patt Clancy

Keeper, a disillusioned social worker, transitions to a new career as a death doula. She tells the story of her fateful meeting with a new agey Grim Reaper (think of Death as a middle-aged woman with purple hair who smells like charcoal). Keeper also takes the audience through a guided meditation (of sorts) through their own death, into the underworld, and reveals the secret to immortality.

Lea (a child protective worker) and Shea (a single father) meet in an apartment in lower-Manhattan. They both live with OCD and are haunted by obsessive thoughts of harming the children in their lives. As they try to overcome their fear of human contact, they are attacked by two OCD ghosts: Margo (a homeless teenager), and Brid (Shea's grandmother).

After the death of his wife, Mellie Haskell is wild with grief. He wants to end things, but can't fully commit to committing suicide. His neighbor Bo is willing to offer him some help in this regard, but only if Mellie can stack his languishing pile of firewood before the first frost. Mellie enlists the help of his daughters Noa and Lila to finish stacking the woodpile, but when a moment of violence upends Mellie's world, the woodpile begins taking on a strange and vital role in the lives of his daughters. A play about unresolved grief, the inadequacy of memory, and buried desires, House Made of Years tells the story of a family from the standpoint of a woodpile’s life cycle, and explores how we can become estranged from ourselves, each other, and the natural world.