Part choral narrative, part group fabulation, NEXT YEAR PEOPLE follows three women as they build a life together on an abandoned island in the Atlantic. Grappling with the ecstasy, 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.
NEXT YEAR PEOPLE
Salt. Glass. Water. (stage) Blood.
Created by writer/performers Katie Bender, Rachel Mars, and Gab Reisman with director Caitlin Sullivan NEXT YEAR PEOPLE began in the noxious aftershocks of Brexit and the 2016 U.S. election, and grew into a piece that asks: 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.
NEXT YEAR PEOPLE received development support from Fusebox Festival, The Playwrights Center, New Georges/Page 73, and The Museum of Human Achievement. It premiered at Fusebox Festival Austin in 2019 in and available for tour.
NEXT YEAR PEOPLE Creative Team
Writer/Performers: Katie Bender, Rachel Mars, Gab Reisman | Director: Caitlin Sullivan | Producer: Lucy Jackson
Lighting design: Isabella Byrd | Sound design: Peter Stopschinski
Katie Bender 