THIS IS WHERE IT ENDS Will Open This Month

This Is Where It Ends, a contemporary riff on Sex, Lies & Videotape and one of the featured LGBTQ plays at this year's Broadway Bound Theatre Festival, is slated to run four performances on July 30 at 8:00pm, July 31 at 5:00pm, August 2 at 2:00pm, and Aug. 3 at 2:00pm at AMT Theater, 354 West 45th St.. Tickets range from $30-$40 and can be purchased online. Content Warning: Intended for 18+ audiences. Contains sexual content and adult language. 

In This is Where It Ends, a married couple from Los Angeles, Stephen and James, invite Stephen's brash actor friend, Kody, and James's former fraternity brother, Ellis – once an entitled entrepreneur, now a spiritually-minded, recovering sex addict -- for a weekend at their Palm Springs home to celebrate James's forty-fifth. Unknown to Stephen, James engages in extramarital adventures with anonymous hookups and Kody, while Stephen, increasingly frustrated in his role as ornamental house-husband, finds himself first unnerved by Ellis's blunt honesty, then drawn to his refreshing candor. As the weekend progresses, the walls come down and the gloves come off as the four men bristle under the weight of the roles all of them have played for far too long.

“My goal was to take a standard setup – gaggle of gays converge on a house for someone's birthday/wedding/anniversary/etc. – and upend the tropes we usually find there,” says Playwright Chris Phillips.  “I wanted to push beyond the limits of what gay men have expressed about themselves and question why we behave the way we behave with each other. Sure, it's about marriage to some extent, but as with all of my work, it's mostly about fraternity: how gay men do or do not connect with each other, the roles we play, our willingness to embody certain reductive images. I've always found my fellow gay men fascinating, infuriating, and confounding – usually at the same time.”
 
The play's director Aaron Benham adds: “This Is Where It Ends is intelligent, honest, uncompromising Gay Theatre. The play tells the story of adult gay men suddenly realizing that they have been hiding behind stereotypes imposed on them by hetero-normative society. Such fear and marginalization only keep us from truly embracing and enriching the Gay Community. This production confronts the gay status quo and challenges us to honor one another for the struggles we have overcome and the creative spirit we contribute to the country and to the world.”

Running as part of the 2025 Broadway Bound Theater Festival, This Is Where It Ends algins with the festival's focus on socially engaged storytelling and its commitment to developing new theatrical voices.