Originally developed as part of the New Group’s 2018 summer writers group, this play was born from an image: a snapshot of a man standing over the edge, purple heart in hand, and of a woman who isn’t truly there. What it became was a musing on the way families fracture under the stress of a post-war world. Very loosely based on the WWII survivors of Sydney’s own family, Untitled America Play is a questioning of who we become when we must confront no longer being who we thought we were—whether that is the perfect soldier or the perfect housewife or something darker altogether. Centered around surface-happy couple Sigfried and Truda, two Holocaust survivors attempting to conceal their identities in front of their neighbors, the work engages our lies, histories, and desires in the face of our traumatized psyches. When Sigfried gets a dirty job with a bigoted boss and Truda discovers something to put a wrench in her affair, their imaginary spotless worlds begin to crumble. It is an unapologetically gay, Jewish look at how we see the ruins lying at our feet, and how—maybe—we too create them…

LGBTQ+, Nazism, murder, blood

2F, 3M