SHATTERED: A Drama in Two Acts

This is a tragedy that ends with a baby. This is a play about America. Kids have a knack for absorbing cultural information and reflecting it back in ways that reveal us to ourselves: when a child speaks we should listen.

SHATTERED is the two-act tragedy that Ben Freeman wrote at the end of elementary school that tells the story of the Thatchers, a family in Revolutionary War-era Philadelphia encountering the world changing rapidly around them. There are across-enemy-lines romances; a literal shotgun wedding; long soliloquies to God; deaths by murder, suicide, and tuberculosis. As Phoebe Nir wrote in a review of the first staging of this project back in 2011, “What makes ‘Shattered’ so funny is the felt presence of its ten-year old author, the touching and transparent desire to impress that makes characters use every fancy vocabulary word he knows, cite a Social Studies textbook worth of colonial trivia, and soliloquize to the heavens with alarming frequency. We see what he was trying to achieve simultaneous with his delightful failure, and it makes for a roaring good time.” This July, come see SHATTERED as it’s never been seen before – as an immersive theatrical experience.

There are three opportunities to come play with us:

• Thursday, July 7, we’ll hold a TASK party, a simple structure for creativity and collaboration devised by the contemporary artist Oliver Herring. Come for the good music and the opportunity to warm up the space with your creative energy. We’ll start at 7:00 and go all night! (Not really, Ben is turning 32 that night and we love a sensible bedtime 😉.)
• Friday, July 8 is the performance of SHATTERED. Doors at 7:00, performance at 7:30. Come ready to: laugh, shout “Peace, freedom, and liberty!!”, destroy a statue of King George III, and reflect on what it means to live in this country now through the lens of a fifth grader’s understanding of revolution and colonialism.
• Sunday, July 10, come back to the space for an intimate workshop, using scenes from the play as a prism for understanding our own inner children and the generative themes that drive our creative work in societal context. The workshop will begin at 2:00pm and go to 4:00pm. You can expect to journal, read from the play out loud, and discuss who you were in elementary school and who you are now in a supportive context of peers.

Ben Freeman (he/him) is a theater artist, musician, educator, and spiritual director. His theatrical work includes previous iterations of SHATTERED at PianoFight in San Francisco, culturefix and The Tank in NYC, and Brown University in Providence, RI; as well as his full-length play, The Shape of the Entire; and serving as both an actor and a director on J. Sylvan’s . As a musician, Ben’s work includes the self-released album Quiet Fury (2022) and EP Providence (2015), as well as production and music direction credits in theater and film. He teaches improv and musical theater with and serves as a ritual leader at , in addition to working in freelance capacities as a facilitator, spiritual director, and theater chaplain, embedding proactive spiritual care at the heart of the creative process. You can find him on Instagram , on Bandcamp , and on major streaming services and .