In a World...

In this crowded world, people treat others' bodies as their own, and everyone's pretty happy. Relationships are fluid as water, when people live and work literally cheek to cheek. But ominous dread lurks behind this free love -- the only open spaces left are graveyards, and when a child dies, he's replaced by a neighbor so there's no empty space. In this world of universal bland affection, can one couple find a REAL connection?

In this world of 48-hour lifespans, life is fast AND slow. A child is born ready for college; he meets and marries his wife on the flight to Harvard, is divorced before landing, and reunites before night. Then again, filling out an old man's life insurance paperwork can take three generations. One insurance agent, desperate to see the horizon before he dies, builds a boat with a new love -- but the trip will take HOURS; will he live to see the island, or will his grandchildren have to finish the journey for him?

In this world where gentlemen prefer sopranos, it's important to keep up your song-and-dance skills -- you never know when a number will break out on the BART or at work. And if you get emotional enough to sing your thoughts, *everyone* can hear you. In our story, a mezzo finds love with a newspaper lyricist, a kickball team finds their underdog plot, and a perennial sidekick gets a moment in the spotlight!

The upside: your shirt can give you tips on scoring with the ladies, your blender can give you therapy, the bullet fragments at a crime scene can tell you what happened... The downside: when objects can't perform their designated function, they go crazy! A frustrated GI Joe goes on a rampage, kidnapping his owner. Can her beloved CareBear care enough to escape from the attic and save her?

With no inner monologue, people have to have some pretty tough skins -- cause, let's face it, everyone is kind of a bastard. Maybe you need therapy to learn NOT to talk about your feelings. Nevertheless, between the endless colliding trains of thought, our heroes manage to find friendship, love, and most importantly, CALM.

It's a world with Match.com, CraigsList, and adorable woodland creatures that follow innocent peasant girls around until they are beaten down by the Prince she loves and baked into a pie.  The typical Disney ladies (whose mothers are all dead, of course) start off in the typical Disney situations (Princess not in love with the Prince she wants to marry, Peasant in love with a Prince betrothed to someone else), but wind up in quite unexpected places in a world where cartoon evil reigns supreme.

When you're born knowing you have a twin, and that twin is evil, you have a choice to make.  Work with them, or spend your life avoiding their mischief.  Or are those the only options?  How do you deal with a spouse who switches places with his evil twin so he can have an affair? And what happens when the evil twin realizes he's happy in the life he's made in the mean time.  Good and Evil blurred and changed as we explored a world where even the President's evil twin got some time in the Oval Office.

(at the SF Theater Festival's East Garden Stage)

How difficult is it to be color blind in a world where people literally wear their emotions on their sleeves (and around the rest of their bodies, too)?  If Magenta, Fuchsia, Garnet, Ruby, Scarlet and Vermilion are all just "Red" to you, how do you accurately judge your wife's emotional state?  And what about those little blue pills that help you stay Green when it really counts?  This world provided us with a wealth of colorful situations to explore.

So what really happens when you step on a crack?  Do people celebrate the rain because that means there might be a... gasp... DOUBLE RAINBOW?!  Are left handed people truly sinister?  In a world where the superstitious writing on the wall is, in fact, fact, every mirror is a disaster waiting to ruin seven years of your life, and every four leaf clover is your ticket out of jail.

Two brothers strain under the pressure to model themselves after one of the Elvisish Trinity -- Young Elvis, Crazy Elvis or Fat Elvis, while a young girl fights social norms to become the first legal Elvis Impersonator.  Will one brother's infatuation with Elvis' granddaughter blind him to the fact that the love of his life stands before him like a plate of pork chops and jelly donughts? With the other brother's teacher blind him to the wonders of scientific study in favor of a life of homage to The King.

The kids have tasted the birds and the bees, and it's giving them quite a buzz, an author bends his muse to his will with a good dose of toner, and a priest questions why his faith comes from a bottle instead of from within.  What happens in a world where eating rocks can get you stoned, and Happy Meals really make you happy?  Does it matter that your abrasive teen is just snacking on SOS pads?  And should you really chow down on test answers before taking that big test, or will you just end up regurgitating misunderstood facts?

In the year 2020, something happened to humanity.  Ears and minds were opened in an event called "The Great Listening" and now everyone can hear the music in everyone else's head.  Was it evolution? An act of the Supreme Being? Or has everyone finally gone insane?  In a world where throat rending song is a common occurrance, how hard is it to actually communicate with those that you love?