Hospital 2008

Axis Company’s episodic play Hospital examines the interior life of a man in a terminal coma. Entering this state in a different way every year, the audience travels with him as he lives out his last few days roaming the vast, dark interiors of his own brain. Although Hospital 2008 is a serial play, each evening can be viewed separately as a self-contained, short play.

New York runs on water. From the steam system that heats and electrifies the five boroughs, to the water that flows from millions of taps, without water there is no city. Currently, only two tunnels provide all this water; Tunnel #1 was completed in 1917 and even the newest sections of Tunnel #2 are at least 73 years old. Begun in 1970, Water Tunnel #3’s projected completion date is in 2020. As far underground as the Chrysler Building is tall, teams of “sandhogs” risk their lives digging the path for this tunnel. Every day, far down beneath the feet of all New Yorkers, below the subway and the sewer, the sandhogs live their days in a dangerous, subterranean universe.

Hospital 2008 takes place in the aftermath of a catastrophic collapse of part of this tunnel. Three men are trapped beneath the city streets, in a part of the system that is unrecognizable to them. As they attempt to find their individual ways back to the surface, it becomes clear that something beyond normal comprehension may have occurred deep beneath the capitol of the world.