“I’m not arguing for the end of the world – but then again, maybe I am”

A charming devil arrives in the quiet village of Edmonton to bargain for the souls of its residents in exchange for their darkest wishes. Elizabeth should be his easiest target, having been labeled a “witch” and cast out by the town, but her soul is not so readily bought. An inventive retelling of a Jacobean drama, this sharp, subversive fable debates how much our souls are worth when hope is hard to come by.

Inspired by The Witch of Edmonton by Rowley, Dekker, and Ford.

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“To me, we are poised in the quintessential moment of asking ourselves if we can fix the system from within or if the only way forward is just to burn it all down. I am neither as optimistic nor as radical as many of my friends, and I do tend toward believing that I have to engage with the systems that are present. That the needle gets moved — painfully slowly — because you work with what you have, not because you throw it all out. And yet, in the last three years, I have really questioned whether we are leading ourselves to a point where the systems themselves can’t be salvaged. The question that the play is posing is closely aligned with questions that I am asking daily.

I wrote this play in this way because there’s no other way that I can process these huge questions. I think in a different moment in time it would have been a very different play. I wake up in the morning with the feeling that we are hurtling toward something inexorable, and I have heard people — with whom I have absolutely no political common ground — express the exact same feeling. It’s either very strange or very human that we can agree on nothing except our fear of impending doom.” – Jen Silverman, Geffen Playhouse