Troy Deutsch

The Great Salt Lake is disappearing—and so is this family’s sanity. When the eccentric Sharp family reunites to sell their late father’s lakeside home, chaos erupts as they’re forced to confront their legacy and the truth that lies beneath the salty water just outside their window.

A lonely advertising salesman feels forgotten and left behind by the frantic world, until he discovers that his company, X-Space, might be selling more than advertising space.

In the play, I set out to explore monotonous office culture, masculinity, and queerness, as well as my disillusionment as an elder Millennial, feeling left behind by the rapidly changing world. I also want to explore how parents, mothers especially, can shape our worldview, propel us forward, or hold us back... The tone I'm going for is a slightly futuristic Charlie Kaufman-esque workplace comedy meets A Wrinkle in Time. Though the structure of the play breaks wide open in Act 2, I'm imagining a very simple set and using projections to create most of the play's magic.

A critically acclaimed climate change author and his brother, an opportunistic entrepreneur opening a hail damage repair company called “Oh Hail No,” come back to their small Minnesota town and nothing is as they expected it would be.

HAIL DAMAGE is an absurdist family comedy that descends into a Kafkaesque nightmare of sorts, confronting America’s inaction on climate change, the climate refugee crisis, and the white privilege standing in our way. Inspired by David Wallace-Wells' book, The Uninhabitable Earth, HAIL DAMAGE illuminates the gravity of the climate change crisis we’re facing and casts our non-action and indifference as utterly ridiculous, absurd, and slightly horrifying...

"There is infinite hope, only not for us."
–Franz Kafka

"There is no hope, except for us."
–Jonathan Franzen

She seems to have it all: a rich husband, a maid, a chauffeur. Then one night, bleary-eyed and barefoot, she stumbles to the zoo in her nightgown. ORANGUTAN is a haunting and absurd one-woman show about the mother of a brutish (slightly orange) would-be dictator, and the tribalism that’s tearing our country apart.

“For hardly any one is so careless as to breed from his worst animals.”
—Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

On a warm North Carolina night, a girl with big hair drinks Schnapps. A boy is afraid to fall asleep. And a woman with nowhere to go gets in her motorhome and just starts driving, following the road where it leads...

"The play is a Rashomon of sorts... This is theater for grown ups, there’s cursing, nudity, complicated, murky moral quandaries and uncertainty that collides in an ending that had the audience talking in speculative mutterings after the curtain call... Let’s remember that theater at its heart is an actor saying words in a dark room... It’s adult and analog, simple and lovely."
-Salt Lake Magazine

“Deutsch weaves a compelling story of people trying to return to simpler, less-frightening moments in their lives, even as real terrors lie ahead of them.”
–Salt Lake City Weekly, *Critics Pick

“There's much to applaud in Salt Lake Acting Company's ambitious premiere of "Bull Shark Attack": bold acting, beautiful language, a nicely wrought stripped-down set, enchanting lighting design and a rich sound score… This is a fine production, which shines a spotlight on the storytelling. Playwright Troy Deutsch's monologues are interestingly written, beautiful language from a talented emerging playwright.”
–Salt Lake Tribune