In collaboration

NEXT YEAR PEOPLE

Bender/Mars/Reisman

Part choral narrative, part group fabulation, NEXT YEAR PEOPLE follows three people as they build a life together on an abandoned island in the Azores.  Grappling with the ecstacy, ugliness, and awkward intimacy of collaboration, NEXT YEAR PEOPLE irreverently charts the making and unmaking of a new society: an interrogation of a new mode of communal living and the practice of creation itself.

Created by writer/performers Katie Bender, Rachel Mars, and Gab Reisman with director Caitlin Sullivan NEXT YEAR PEOPLE began in the noxious aftershocks of the utter shitstorm of 2016. Where do you go when you find where you live is nothing like what you wilfully hoped? What does it actually mean to start again? Who says you’d do it any better? How can you balance  alliance, ambition and pleasure? Jumping between commonplace conversation and choral edict, between moments of physical danger and unembarrassed sensuousness, NEXT YEAR PEOPLE opens a crack into possibility – the radical hopefulness of a fly-by-night, parallel existence.

Developed with the help of The Orchard Project, The Playwrights’ Center, Fusebox, New Georges and Salvage Vanguard Theater, NEXT YEAR PEOPLE will premiere at Fusebox Festival in 2019.