FutureFest Finalists 2009

When a New York gallery debuts his gruesome painting Carve, struggling artist Josh Darbin finally thinks he’s hit the big time. But when the fictional female subject of his painting appears shivering, angry, and most definitely alive on his Brooklyn fire escape, Darbin is forced to confront his long-time assistant and lover Jessa, and the dark secrets they’ve both been harboring. In this suspenseful, romantically offbeat comedy, Darbin and Jessa are forced through the rabbit hole to figure out how a supposed figment of Josh’s imagination has bloomed into vibrant, desperate life.

In the spring of 1964, Grey Elliott, an award-winning photojournalist with a reputation for getting close to danger, has a disturbing dream about a lynching he witnessed as a child.  When he receives a visit the next morning from an itinerant gardener looking for work, a series of coincidences convinces him that the man is the ghost of his long-dead father.  Now, after years of hiding his mixed racial heritage, Grey must examine himself and confront the implications of continuing his deception, a journey that becomes only more complicated when he learns that his wife is pregnant.  Grey retreats to the place he knows best to find the answers—his darkroom—but the dreams continue and their outcomes grow more dire and sinister, leading Grey to make one final bold move to try to stop them…or fulfill them.

Trim, fit, and very neat, Larry is the G-MAN, a garbageman. If other people have a problem with his job, too bad. He likes collecting trash just fine. He's fairly successful with women, although it's mostly one-night stands. Frequently he's with his easy-going buddy, Jack, a busdriver. He also regularly visits his mom in a nursing home and that often brings him into conflict with the home's supervisor. Still, it's nothing he can't handle. His well-to-do sister can't bring herself to go. She still worships their late father, a man Larry remembers as a tyrant.

But his orderly routine is disrupted when the boss switches his shift and Larry makes an awful discovery. It triggers an ill-timed visit to the nursing home, a run-in with the supervisor, and ends with his arrest. He's soon released from jail, but he can't shake the memory of what he found in the trash and he finds it impossible to go back to work. Then...help comes from an unexpected quarter. It leads him to a new job and the blossoming of a real relationship.  

The year is 1948. The Soviets have blockaded Berlin, attempting to force the Western powers out of the city. The Airlift, the Allied attempt to keep the city alive, is barely two months old – and it is failing badly.

Into the blockaded city comes Kevin Riley, chief foreign correspondent for the American News Service. He has not been in Berlin since 1934, when he was expelled by the new Nazi government. He’s come back now at the request of an old friend from that time,

Ernst von Helldorf – who is now a condemned Nazi war criminal about to be hanged for his crimes.

But Kevin has come back only partly because of Ernst. He’s also come back to face the ghosts and monsters of his own past, ghosts and monsters that have pursued him since he left Berlin, pursued him from war zone to war zone since 1934 and who have now, finally, brought him back full circle to where it began.

“The new cadaver…will be referred to as a neomort.  The ward or hospital in which it is maintained will be called a bioemporium…” Willard Gaylin, “Harvesting the Newly Dead” Harper’s Magazine, Sept. 1974

The play takes place today, or a few years into the future.  A wealthy and influential group of investors has taken advantage of existing laws and the interpretations of a more libertarian court to open the first for-profit bioemporium. 

After a year of relative calm, the enterprise is gearing up for a major Initial Public Offering (IPO), in advance of opening new centers across the country.  The CEO, hired for his ethical reputation and previous financial successes, is paired by the Board with a younger, more aggressive president.  The play begins during the week of the IPO launch, which is filled with critical presentations, as well as a visit from a team of investigators representing The President’s Council on Bioethics.  The team is headed by a philosophy professor with impeccable academic credentials and a great deal of Congressional clout. 

Albeit for very different reasons (secular progress / a business legacy/ money and power), all three of the key players want this endeavor to succeed.  A wrench is tossed, however, when it is discovered by accident that a family member of one of these players, brain-dead because of a botched suicide attempt, is alive and protected from all procedures within the facility.  The resulting conflict of convictions forces to the surface all of the issues that have kept such a facility fictional.