Helen Banner

In a wild new robotic economy, AI determines people’s right to buy or sell their own citizenship. A family descended from the Pilgrims has fallen on hard times. Will they be allowed to cash out and go somewhere new? An imaginative, surprising perspective on national borders and our own humanity.

"Playwright Helen Banner has penned a brilliant piece of speculative fiction!"-Q On Stage

"A richly imaginative and thought-provoking vision of the not-so-distant future!"-NJArts

"I cannot more strongly urge you to get to Luna Stage and see Westphalia!"-Out In Jersey

Intelligence transports us into the basement of the US State Department, where two young Foreign Service Officers are forced to rethink their secret views on American diplomacy, working on a back-channel negotiation with Sarah MacIntyre, a charismatic but controversial special envoy. As events on the ground push them deeper into role-play, the question of when we make bargains with violent men becomes ever more personal and a future of war or peace hangs in the balance. “Gripping” (New York Times), “Intelligence doesn’t just pass the Bechdel-Wallace test, it raises the bar for what a feminist production can be” (Opplaud). Intelligence will be performed at the The Assembly, Roxy Upstairs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2022, produced by Dutch Kills Theater Company. An earlier version of the play appeared in the NYTW Next Door Series in January 2019.

In the 1890s, all around America, Victorian entrepreneurs exploited a craze for wrecking steam trains head-on on the final day of State Fairs, sometimes with fatal consequences as steam can explode like a bomb. KATE, a train crash survivor and her husband, PHILIP, are struggling with her diagnosis of railroad spine. They want to use a staged train wrecking at their local State Fair to cure Kate and regain the bohemian marriage they used to have. As they manipulate the stunt crew in pursuit of increasing thrills, they antagonize ALISTAIR, the puritanical carnie man in charge of the wrecking, and put the whole town at risk in a collision of steel, sex, race, gender and class.

SOLDIER LOVE is a love triangle set in the air that examines our contemporary beliefs about courage and self-realization. FRED, an American soldier on his last day of leave from active combat in Afghanistan, takes off on a final day of hang-gliding with his lover ERIN. His wife LINDA interrupts them at take off, aware of the potential affair, but oblivious to Fred and Erin's plan to fly AWOL over the border. When Linda makes Fred take an unwanted radio with him and keep talking to her on the ground, she discovers their flight plan.

Furious at his ability to leave her and their young children and betray his country, Linda ruthlessly uses Erin's fear of crashing to force Fred to choose between freedom and duty.