In Play, Bessie Award–winning director and choreographer Faye Driscoll uses the ritual of storytelling to explore our reliance on stories to relate to one another and form identities as individuals and citizens. Play is the second installment in her series Thank You for Coming, and focuses on the shadows, gaps, repetitions, and stutters between what we say and what we do while we say it. The physical and aural exist in a slippery relationship, as performers ventriloquize, shape-shift, and speak through and for each other.

This semi-fictional collective autobiography explores “who we are” as both mythically urgent and elusively empty beings, laying bare the dichotomous experience of self and the performance of self. It asks us to consider how personal and societal narratives both define and reduce our lived experience and inform the stories we tell about ourselves, in a strange and delightful meditation on language and the desire for meaning.