Sunday, July 1 @ 7:30pm  |  FREE ADMISSION

Darwin’s Basement

A new play

By JoeAnn Hart

Darwin’s Basement is dark comedy in two acts about hoarding with environmental undertones. Over the course of three days, a mother and her scientist daughter struggle over the mother’s mental illness. The daughter is a renown expert on the viscacha of Patagonia, a large fuzzy rodent that hoards for no apparent evolutionary reason. The father, a retired high school biology teacher, is missing and there is a very large snake in the basement brought in to control the rats.

There was a first reading & talk back of Darwin’s Basement in May 2016 at the Rocky Neck Cultural Center. It was directed by Jeff Zinn and produced by Mary John Boylan.

JoeAnn Hart is the author of the novels Float and Addled. Her short fiction, essays, and articles focus on the relationship between humans and their environments, natural or otherwise. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Orion magazine, The Hopper, and the anthology Black Lives Have Always Mattered. She presented her novel Float, a dark comedy about plastics in the ocean, at the International Literature Festival Berlin 2017.