It Couldn’t Get Worse; or, The Margarita Boat Tour Incident at theSpace @ Venue 45

Maggie disappeared after the Margarita Boat Tour Incident. No one is entirely sure how that happened. Or why Edinburgh has one. Her mother and her fiancée go looking for her. They end up locked inside a lighthouse. There are three immediate problems. One: the light doesn’t work. Two: the radio has thirty-two channels and none of them are helpful. Three: they cannot leave. This would be manageable if they liked each other. Judy believes everything happens for a reason. Claire would like that reason immediately. Judy believes in God. Claire believes in having sex with Judy’s daughter.

What begins as a search effort becomes something much harder to escape. The storm closes in. The questions get sharper. The answers don’t come.

Blending feverishly funny comedy with creeping environmental horror, It Couldn’t Get Worse; Or, The Margarita Boat Tour Incident follows two people forced into an uneasy alliance with each other, their beliefs, and the possibility that they have lost the one thing binding them together. It’s a play that turns on you halfway through—one that starts funny and ends somewhere you didn’t agree to go.

About the playwrights
Mariah Lee Squires and S.W. Jones are a Seattle-based writing duo known for sharp, genre-defying plays that blend gothic storytelling with a contemporary edge, including Carmilla: A Gay, Gothic Spree and A Scythe and a Sandglass the Skeleton Bore.Riley Gene is a London-based playwright and producer whose work spans horror, comedy, and large-scale musical storytelling, exploring transformation, power, and survival.