Ghost Light Now & Then at Theater for the New City

Ghost Light Now & Then is a “time-fluid” play that is both historic and contemporary. A ghost light is a single light left on onstage when a theater is otherwise dark. There is a superstition that every theater has ghosts and that ghost lights provide illumination for the ghosts to perform onstage. During an inexplicable seismic event in 2017, New Yorkers Becky and Mandy, a lesbian married couple, are flung through a window into the early twentieth century Greenwich Village Theater. Inspired by “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz,” the play follows their journey home. They wander through remnants of scenery, encountering ghosts from productions that haunt the site of the theater that was demolished in 1930. Characters and snatches of dialogue from these productions of the past are woven into this contemporary play. The women discover that issues and conflicts confronting their world—homophobia, racism and anti-Semitism--haven’t changed in a century, and take the lessons they learn back to the present.