A complete anthology of the five MainStage plays from the 2016 Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, Nebraska.
Portugal by Elizabeth Heffron When an 'off-normal event' occurs at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in rural Eastern Washington - home to the US' largest stockpile of unprocessed, highly radioactive nuclear waste and the most contaminated place in the Western Hemisphere - the lives of 5 local people are changed forever.
Midlife by Ben Hoover Becky daydreams. Becky gets fired. Becky worries that her barista got kidnapped. Becky is afraid an older woman is taking over her mind. Will Becky ever find solid ground? Experienced largely from Becky's first-person perspective, Midlife situates the audience deep inside her brain. It asks the audience to consider where the mind goes when it wanders, what it means to have agency over your actions, and encourages wonder over what goes on in other people's heads.
Night at the Big Chief Motel by Caroline Prugh It's May, 27, 1994. Abigail & Jet are driving cross-country to meet Richard (boyfriend of former, best friend of latter) in L.A. A new twist on a classic American genre, Night at the Big Chief Motel is a road trip fairytale from the era before smart phones and Google maps.
Catch the Wall by Gabrielle Reisman After New Orleans bouncer MC dies, middle-schoolers Cleo and Justice plot a music video so their mentor's memory can live on. As the MC's ghost tangles with the girls' Teach for America teachers, students and educators push back against a button-down charter school climate, and work to get their own stories heard.
If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka by Tori Sampson Exploring the annexation of beauty while employing a West African folklore alongside modern American culture, If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka, follows four teenage girls as they recant how they've come to accept the definition of societal beauty standards and reasons people choose to risk everything for the opportunity to exist within its narrow definition. Located in this fictional town of Affreakah, Amirrorkah, Kaya, Massassi, Adama and Akim are given an opportunity to live in a society where their individual beauty can reign supreme, however it comes at dangerous price. This play doesn't ask the question how much is beauty worth but rather, why are so many willing to pay its price?
