Having dedicated her life to religious service, Shelley runs a Bronx soup kitchen with unsentimental efficiency, but lately her heart’s not quite in it. Her brisk nature masks an unsettling fear that her efforts are meaningless. When Emma – an idealistic but confused college dropout – arrives to volunteer, her reckless mix of generosity and self-involvement pushes Shelley to the breaking point. With keen humor and startling compassion, Heidi Schreck’s play navigates the mystery of faith, the limits of forgiveness, and the pursuit of something resembling joy.

When he was six years old, our narrator’s mother was taken to the hospital. Dad says she’s “done something stupid.” She finds it hard to be happy. So he starts to make a list of everything that’s brilliant about the world. Everything that’s worth living for: Ice cream, Kung Fu movies, Burning things, Laughing so hard you shoot milk out your nose, Construction cranes, Me. Soon, the list takes on a life of its own. Based on true and untrue stories, Every Brilliant Thing is a life-affirming story of how to achieve hope through focusing on the smallest miracles of life.

Eighteen-year-old Dontrell Jones the Third decides that it is his duty and destiny to venture into the Atlantic Ocean in search of an ancestor lost during the Middle Passage. But his family is not at all ready to abandon its prized son to the waters of a mysterious and haunting past. Blending poetry, humor, wordplay, and ritual, Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea is a present-day hero’s quest exploring the lengths and depths we must go to redeem history’s wrongs.