The year was 2019, if you can imagine. I was sick and tired of the plays I was reading. They were all horrible! They weren’t weird or sexy or funny. No one was writing good plays anymore, if you can imagine, which was quite sad for me, as I needed good plays to be written. I am, spiritually-speaking, dependent on good plays.

 

So I asked my friend Sarah Blush, “Have you read any good plays?” and she sent me a play called The Executrix by a playwright I’d never heard of named Emma Horwitz. 

 

I opened it up and fell in love with the first sentence. Now here was a writer who could do a sentence good! Someone who liked her words slippery and spiky and twisted! Here was style, tone, perspective, a real pas-de-deux between two she-hornets in a studio apartment, a true understanding of what excited me personally about theater and language and plays. The Executrix was a whole world on the absolute cusp of my imagination; something I had never looked at directly but now that it was here, staring back at me on the page, an undeniable part of what made me a person and an artist. 

 

The older I get (ho ho ho) the less frequently I get my shit shaken up by something I read. It is unbelievable to me that I didn’t read The Executrix when I was still forming brain cells because that’s where it lives, forever, in my primeval artist gunk. Right there alongside seeing Rocky Horror Picture Show one late night on cable when I was 12 years old. Rushing a play called Blasted at Soho Rep when I was 18, then, probably mere weeks later, watching Blue Velvet in somebody’s dorm room. 

 

Not everyone gets to read their favorite play and then marry their favorite playwright and then, years later, produce their favorite play with their favorite playwright directed by the person who introduced them. Then of course, we’ve got that person’s husband as sound designer and so many other friends working or acting or helping… Is this another world on the cusp of my imagination? To be making weird, sexy, funny theater under the exact circumstances that make life feel worthwhile? A spiritual buffet! 

 

I’m so very excited to share this play with you. We start previews on Thursday and run only through November 14. We can’t and won’t go longer. The union wouldn’t stand for it.

 

Join us. I hope you brought wine because I made the meatballs.