Season 38: Simply Uncategorizable
Established & Emerging Artists Creating Bold New Work
Annex Theatre is an anarcho-democratic collective of artists dedicated to producing bold new work in an environment of improbability, resourcefulness, and risk. Since 1986, our ever-expanding company has created magical moments onstage every season that reflect our most current worldviews and imagine exciting and visionary futures.
Join us for another incredible season of fully staged productions, script readings, and a puzzling mystery that each feature something for everyone: how to cope with grief, connections between literary figures across history, creative and multilingual interpretations of classic works, trauma and support from our given and chosen family, and exploring queerness all over the world.
Leave Only Footprints
IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE: OCTOBER 3 – 31, 2024
CONCEIVED BY EMILY PIKE & EMILY SERSHON
CREATED BY THE COMPANY OF ANNEX
Leave Only Footprints is an immersive and haunted experience set in a cursed Pacific Northwest state park along the Salish Sea where a lone hiker has recently gone missing. Venture inside to explore the mysterious wood, encounter its inhuman inhabitants, and uncover the mystery of the wayward hiker’s disappearance. As you puzzle your way through the eldritch forest, remember to stay on the path, or risk leaving only footprints.
Mother/Daughter2
STAGED READING & TALKBACK: NOVEMBER 13, 2024
WRITTEN BY VANESSA MILLER
DIRECTED BY CRYSTAL DAWN MUNKERS
In this dark comedy, three generations of women come together following a grim voicemail announcing the death of the family’s patriarch. For a family skilled at burying their feelings, saying goodbye to a loved one isn’t easy, especially if the loved one was hard to love. From chaotic searches for cremated remains to confrontations in a graveyard, Mother/Daughter² explores how each generation copes with loss, ultimately leading to moments of surprising unity and understanding.
GOLD
MAINSTAGE PRODUCTION: JANUARY 17 – FEBRUARY 8, 2025
WRITTEN BY MARCUS GORMAN
DIRECTED BY JASMINE JOSHUA
When 19-year-old Frankie inherits her late grandfather’s little black book, she goes on a cross-country road trip to meet his mistresses. As she and her college bestie travel across the United States and through decades of her family’s secret history, she learns not just who her grandfather truly was…but also a key to her own identity. GOLD is a funny and relatable drama about what we leave behind. And also, some psychedelic dinosaurs.
DIRTY
SCRIPT READINGS: FEBRUARY 4 & 5, 2025
WRITTEN BY JAYNE HUBBARD
DIRECTED BY SUZ PONTILLO
The year is 1891. As business magnates continue to rally the community to rebuild after a glue fire destroys most of downtown Seattle, everyone looks to the wealthiest person in town: local brothel owner Madame Lou Graham. A historical fiction with lots of music, DIRTY explores the complex lives of the most powerful figures in town: Seattle’s sex workers.
Blue to Blue
MAINSTAGE PRODUCTION: MARCH 21 – APRIL 12, 2025
WRITTEN BY CHRISTINE DEAVEL
What do you do when your mother dies, your father decides to mail you box after random box of her things, and Emily Dickinson poems begin appearing in everyone’s pockets? If you’re Beryl, you head to your job at the coffin-making shop and look for guidance from the two-person Greek chorus that now accompanies your changed life. Unfolding over three days in the 1990s and set in the ancient neighborhood of grief, Blue to Blue presents the timeless search for solace after loss and the unexpected ways it arrives.
Paradise Untapped
OFF-NIGHT PRODUCTION: MARCH 25 – APRIL 9, 2025
WRITTEN BY JACK WOLFRAM
DIRECTED BY CATHERINE BLAKE SMITH
Deborah Milton and Mary Shelley entered our world a lifetime apart in England to world-renowned intellectuals, tethered across time by shared fiery intellect, circumstances of birth, and creative compulsion. As both yearn to make a name for themselves and share the stories each feels that only they carry, their isolated connectedness illuminates centuries of stories untold, writers never written, and a Paradise Untapped.
FIGURE DRAWING FOR DUMMIES
SCRIPT READINGS & TALKBACK: MARCH 31 & APRIL 5, 2025
WRITTEN BY DAISY SCHREIBER
DIRECTED BY Sammy Weinert
Who is responsible for art? In FIGURE DRAWING FOR DUMMIES, when a previously unknown painter rises to overnight, viral fame, it seems like a dream come true. The only problem? The painting that everyone loves is a nude of her girlfriend, a younger woman who didn’t explicitly consent to being the subject. As the painter’s career skyrockets, the painted woman’s life is left to be defined by her naked form. Twenty years later, the painter is preparing to unveil a second painting of the same woman, asking the questions: who deserves the credit, and are we truly separate from those who care for us?
Alice in Arabialand
MAINSTAGE PRODUCTION: MAY 22 – JUNE 14, 2025
WRITTEN BY SAMEER ARSHAD
Alice Smith and her two best friends travel from their small college town to multiple countries in the Arab World so that Alice can finish her doctoral thesis about Arab LGBTQ cultures. On their hilarious misadventures, they discover that everything they thought they knew about queer Arabs was wrong and that they have a whole new education ahead of them. Follow Alice and her friends, both old and new, in Alice in Arabialand as they discover clandestine queer Arab spaces and form new lifelong bonds while figuring out how to organize and find their voices in a place that may not be so different from what they left back home.
Carmilla
SCRIPT READINGS & TALKBACKS: JUNE 2 & 3, 2025
WRITTEN BY MARIAH LEE SQUIRES & S.W. JONES
DIRECTED BY ADRIAN PRENDERGAST
While Count Dracula is often seen as the father of the modern vampire, Carmilla is the 1872 Gothic novella by Sheridan Le Fanu that inspired his inception, predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years. Based on the book of the same name, Carmilla tells the tale of the isolated Laura and the mysterious young woman she falls in love with. But what happens when infatuation turns into obsession? Shattering the mold of male protagonists in horror, the mother of the modern monster is waiting for you.
Jettison to Europa
MAINSTAGE PRODUCTION: AUGUST 8 – 30, 2025
WRITTEN BY ANDY PARK-BUFFELEN
DIRECTED BY FRANCESCA BETANCOURT
Jettison to Europa follows an astronaut, Carey, as she pioneers the inaugural expedition to Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons. Confined to her shuttle’s cockpit during this years-long mission, she is drawn in by the small sattelite’s allure which pulls her millions of miles away from home. Yet the complex affects her journey has on her relationships back on Earth, too, seem fated for the arduous journey. Will Carey’s obsession with reaching Europa cost her everything?
The Game Show
STAGED READINGS & TALKBACKS: AUGUST 18, 26 & 27, 2025
WRITTEN BY MAGGIE HIGGINBOTHAM
DIRECTED BY GRACE CARMACK
Greta and Lynda find themselves trapped in a mysterious game show with a seemingly charming host. As the two women are forced to carry on increasingly absurd rounds of card games, they learn what it means to be a winner or a loser in a system rigged for failure, and what it means to be a winner or loser in their relationship. Dark, funny, and deeply rooted in audience participation, The Game Show is designed to leave the audience asking, “What did I just watch?” and perhaps more importantly, “What did I just participate in?”
Con-Veiled
MAINSTAGE PRODUCTION: OCTOBER 10 – NOVEMBER 1, 2025
WRITTEN BY EJAY AMOR
DIRECTED AVIONA RODRIGUEZ BROWN
Con-Veiled is an emotional whiplash of a story that takes us into a chasm of comedically dark existentialism. We follow two women, Elise and Lily, who begin a journey to reshape their destinies in an apocalyptic world. As they discover their humanity, all of their concepts of morality, sexuality, and religion shift, challenging them to find out what “living” truly means. As the world disintegrates around them, Elise and Lily come to the inevitable moment where they must choose who can survive, and who is left behind to face the end.
The Phantom of the Opera: But Every Character Sings a Different Language and Also I Play All the Parts
IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE: OCTOBER 3 – 31, 2025
CONCEIVED & PERFORMED BY ALEXEI SEBASTIAN CIFRESE
Hearing is believing in this scandalously international burlesque parody of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s classic gothic romance. The epic love triangle and ensemble are performed solo by polyglot baritenor Alexei Sebastian Cifrese. The languages the love triangle sings will be determined by the audience, in the iconic Auction Prologue. Every night you will have two groups of languages to choose from: Spanish, Japanese, or Russian and French, Mandarin Chinese, or Hungarian. In “The Phantom of the Opera but Every Character Sings a Different Language and also I Play All the Parts,” you determine the fate of each performance!
The Genie’s Therapist
SCRIPT READINGS & TALKBACKS: OCTOBER 26 & 28, 2025
WRITTEN BY SAMEER ARSHAD
The legendary genie of the lamp struggles with the trauma of being beholden to the wishes of men for centuries. Living as a disguised recluse in the modern world, he discovers the wonders of psychotherapy and seeks out a therapist. Things take a wild turn as the therapist eventually learns the truth about him. The Genie’s Therapist follows the growth of the genie and his therapist as they become acutely aware of the demands, expectations, and patterns of abuse that people inflict on each other in their pursuit of what they desire the most.
