About the Project
What story do we inherit, and who gets to tell it? The Great Dying braids together pandemic isolation, family reckoning, contested histories, and the uneasy work of truth-telling. As Angela, a writer, shelters at home with her partner during the early days of COVID-19, she becomes consumed by two unfolding crises: her father’s sudden health decline and her research into the 1837 smallpox epidemic that devastated communities across the Great Plains.
Moving between intimate domestic scenes, sharp humor, historical reenactment, and theatrical critique, the play interrogates the stories America tells about disease, violence, and collective memory. But it is also a story about survival: about daughters and parents, love and responsibility, and the fragile beauty that can persist in the shadow of grief.
By turns funny, furious, intellectually searching, and deeply tender, The Great Dying examines contagion in all its forms: viral, colonial, familial, emotional. It is a play about history, responsibility, and the Stories powerful enough not only to wound, but to heal.
Production Team
