LIFE, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT

Noah Haidle's quirk-filled drama of total family dysfunction finally comes to New York this winter, after its world premiere in Chicago in 2014, the success of which quickly generated an encore performance in 2015! It stars Zachary Quinto and is directed once again by the Obie Award-winning Anne Kauffman.

A multi-generational tale filled with oddity and foetuses quoting Tolstoy, Smokefall is yet another ambitious piece from Noah Haidle, whose works exist in a idiosyncratic world of magical realism tempered with kitchen sink drama. Termed 'The King of Quirk' by Chicago reader, Haidle's past works have included Mr. Marmalade and the heart-swapping drama Rag and Bone.

WHAT IS SMOKEFALL ABOUT?

Set in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Smokefall opens at the breakfast table with pregnant housewife Violet. Also present is her teenage daughter Beauty, who survives on a diet of paint and dirt and hasn't spoken a word to anybody since she was thirteen. We are then introduced to Violet's father The Colonel, who is gradually losing his conscious to dementia and exists in a world of unreality, and her unloving husband Daniel. Presiding over the scene is the mysterious Footnote, narrator of inner thoughts.

The bonds that hold this utterly dysfunctional family together are bending under the weight of everyday mundanity and tedium until at last they snap - Daniel runs away. Violet does her best to hold the rest of them together, as the twins inside her belly ready themselves for the outside world.