Program 2013

Blood Play

The Debate Society (USA)

Written by Paul Thureen and Hannah Bos

Directed and Developed by Oliver Butler

Running Time: 75 minutes

The Public Theater: 425 Lafayette Street

$20 Tickets: publictheater.org or call 212-967-7555.

In the tranquil Chicago suburbs in the early 1950's, the kids are away camping with their Jr. Cherokee's Troop, and a string of coincidences yields a spontaneous grown-up party. In the basement of a brand-new ranch house, exotic cocktails like "Rapupu Sours" are sampled, games like "Bee Pee Bo" are played and new friends like Jeep, the door-to-door photographer, are made. But things are happening that no one is talking about and something is stirring underground. A darkly comic thriller of post-war verve and pre-adolescent disquiet.

The Debate Society is a Brooklyn-based company that creates new plays through the collaboration of Hannah Bos, Paul Thureen and Oliver Butler. The Debate Society's plays include Buddy Cop 2 and Cape Disappointment, and the company was awarded a 2012 Obie and a "Village Voice Best of Award" for "Best Argument for Devised Theater - 2010".

"A sort of inverted Virginia Woolf, a night besotted with darkness and drink... an uproarious, unsettling windup to American catastrophe" - New York Magazine

"The Debate Society has emerged as the most beguiling and visually inventive experimental troupe in years." - Time Out New York

Blood Play was originally developed at The Bushwick Starr Theater, as a part of their 2012-13 Season of Programming.  Blood Play has been developed in part at a Clubbed Thumb/Playwrights Horizons SuperLab and  is supported by a grant from the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists, a partnership of Avoda Arts, JDub Records, and the Foundation for Jewish Culture, and made possible with major funding from UJA-Federation of New York. Blood Play is supported by a grant from the Jerome Foundation and is made possible with funding from the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Theater Project, with lead funding from the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation. It is also made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts. In Kings County the Decentralization Program is administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Inc. Blood Play is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered through the Brooklyn Arts Council, Inc.

Photo by Sue Kessler

Additional photos by Javier Oddo