A(U)NTS! Comes to The Brick in May

The Brick will present A(U)NTS! by writer and performer Zoë Geltman, directed by Julia Sirna-Frest. Performances take place May 8–25, at The Brick. How should women be? A play that explores and investigates this question and imagines a new reality of female autonomy, love, self-reliance & sticky glamor.

Annie, Renee and Sherylann are aunts. They work in a dentist's office in Williamsburg and are all rapidly approaching middle age. They make their coffees, drink from their intense water bottles, and bemoan the misery of babysitting, and the shame of being a rapidly aging woman all alone. But what's that, Sherylann, you actually want kids? And Renee, you're freezing your eggs?! GAH! Fwowf! All of a sudden, their worlds crack open. And through that crack, a line of liberated ants marches in. Gleefully, disgustingly and biologically serious, A(U)NTS! explores how the largely childless, largely female, rigorously organized societies of tiny insects known as ants can model a different life for human women.

“My individual experience of being a woman, of living inside a female body, has been disorienting, joyful, disgusting, embarrassing, and empowering, and these are the kinds of experiences I end up creating onstage,” says Geltman.

“This play questions those trappings we've all been told we need to survive—as women, as women of a certain age, as embodied women—and explores the possibility for alternative modes of living and being. I've often felt the impossibility of getting outside ‘the system,' even when making a non-traditional choice: it seems I'm always in relation to patriarchy, to misogyny, to capitalism, in some way. This play is a way for me to try to imagine into being completely outside of that—if just for a strange moment of transforming into an ant and cradling my friends' heads in a pool.”