FIRST AND LAST to Open at ARTX Directed by Ephraim Birney

First and Last by playwright Adam Elliott, directed by Ephraim Birney, will open at ArtX (409 West 14th Street). Running from November 10-22. Previews begin November 10 for a November 12 opening. Tickets ($38) are available for purchase here.

2003, Washington Heights. Morris, a cash-strapped real estate agent, is showing a decrepit rental to Maeve, an artist's assistant desperate for a place to live. Amid broken elevators, feuding neighbors, and the ghost of a dead kitten, a routine apartment showing becomes more than they both bargained for. Offbeat and heartfelt, FIRST AND LAST is about the people who enter our lives, if only for a chapter, and the strange way memory edits life down to its most vivid arrivals and departures.

Open Variations Theater is a New York City nonprofit theater company dedicated to reimagining existing plays through an interdisciplinary lens and promoting new works. Now in its third year, the company has produced an off-off Broadway reimagining of Bekah Brunstetter's Be a Good Little Widow at The Chain Theater, and Hannah Ponturo's 1518: The Dancing Plague, which began development in 2025 and premiered in Los Angeles as a part of the Daredevil Theater Festival in July 2026 before traveling to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August! Beyond the stage, Open Variations served as fiscal sponsor for Gazer, the debut feature from Ryan Sloan and Ariella Mastroianni, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024.

Birthday Cat is an independent production house based in NYC. Founded by Alex Wolf & Anton Cebalo in March, 2025. We work with directors, writers, playwrights, and artists who have an eye for novelty. We like dramatic storytelling about lives not commonly experienced. The strange and the unsettling. Art that's current, experimentally adrift. Something fitting for the 2020s.

The cast includes Kyla Schoer* and Adam Elliott

*Appears Courtesy of Actors Equity. *First and Last is an Equity Approved Showcase*