The Big Funk

Purple Bench Productions presents The Big Funk, the biting, ethereal, and caustic play by Oscar, Tony, and Pulitzer Prize winner John Patrick Shanley.

Daring to take audiences away from the humdrum state of the world in which humanity finds life drearily dulling away, Purple Bench offers a spin on Shanley in which the characters are aware that they and their circumstances are created, existing as dramatic conventions waiting to be used by the audience-indeed, needing to be used. Be warned, fair audience: you are a part of the show…and the living characters know you’re there.

Existing in a space where there are no boundaries between characters and writers, actors and audience, four humans intersect both on the page and on the stage as they hash out the existential stuff that is life. In the midst of the humdrum enters a fifth, Gregory, a villain (or perhaps just another human?) who insists on showing beautiful, hot-shot Jill just how greasy she and her life are — by dousing her ritually with an entire jar of petroleum jelly. She is saved by Austin, who takes her to a dinner party, where she is met by Fifi and Omar, a newly wedded couple with twins on the way. As dinner progresses, the soap boxes are pulled out…and so are the knives.