Dutch Kills Theater Presents THE PROVIDENCE OF NEIGHBORING BODIES

In a black comedy about female friendship, social anxiety and our relationship with 'other', two characters crave connection but live in their own heads, over-analysing all interactions. Dora and Ronnie form a tentative friendship from conversations over the balconies of their provincial Rhode Island apartments, flexing their rusty social skills and trying to act as normal people do. But the dynamic of their jittery new friendship takes a turn when a beaver moves in. Set in a Rhode Island town that no one ever seems to leave, filled with parking lots, strip malls, and nail salons, The Providence of Neighboring Bodies examines what happens when we're pushed out of our comfort zones and are faced with something unknown.

It's an exciting day for Dora in North Providence, Rhode Island. Today is the day Dora is going to make coffee, go outside, and make friends with Ronnie. Ronnie lives in the apartment next door, her balcony just adjacent to Dora's, both overlooking the parking lot and the weird hill across the street. Ronnie isn't sure how she wound up living in North Providence for all these years, but here they both are, where nothing exciting has really happened since the great beaver purge of the mid-20th century. And then out of nowhere, Jane appears.

Playwright Jean Ann Douglass said, "I wrote this play to theatricalize the less-than-sexy thoughts that take up most of our days. I know I am not alone in spending too much time mentally preparing for social interactions, evaluating how conversations are going as they're happening, and analyzing them after the fact. Interacting with other people makes us self-conscious, and that self-consciousness can reach dizzying and dangerous heights when dealing with people that are different, who we're not used to interacting with, or we perceive as an 'other'. In this way, this tender play about women struggling to connect through the fog of their own loneliness becomes about prejudice: the kind that results from small mistakes, inaction from not knowing the right thing to do, and valuing personal comfort over doing what's right."

Jean Ann Douglass is a playwright, performer and artist. Her plays include Ladycation, Seneca Falls, Nondisclosure and Some Editing and Some Theme Music. She is also one half of Human Head Performance Group, who came to the Fringe in 2017 with Obfuscation. The Providence of Neighboring Bodies first premiered at Ars Nova in New York.

Dutch Kills Theater is a theatre company based in New York that focuses on developing and producing new writing by the most exciting emerging artists in the city. Formed in 2011, they previously came to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with The Sister by Eric John Meyer and Adventure Quest by Richard Lovejoy in 2016.

Since the first colonies were settled in the Americas, the industrious, herbivorous, family-oriented beaver has been treated as a nuisance. Nearing extinction in the early 20th century, laws protecting the beaver population were put into place, and they flourished. However, the beaver's role in reshaping landscapes with dams and flooding, while effective at preventing drought and preserving land, wreaked havoc on housing built in low-lying areas. From the 1950s-1970s, Rhode Island, prevented from killing beaver by protection laws, trapped their beaver population and released them in neighboring Connecticut and Massachusetts.