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Overview
5m, 2f / DramaBased on historical fact, Nest is a taut domestic love triangle set against the landscape of a fledgling nation on the verge of realizing its manifest destiny at a terrible bloody cost. The play re-imagines the real life story of Susanna Cox, a young indentured servant from Pennsylvania who murdered her baby in 1809, and the story of the man who wrote the ballad that was sold at her hanging. The play is a searing exploration of American dreams and violence and their place in the national psyche.
"[Susanna Cox's] tale is uniquely American, involving all our national obsessions: sexuality, class, gender roles, the search for national identity, and, most of all, the insidious, hypocritical piety coded into our cultural DNA...Doran is particularly deft at constructing dialogue filled with small, characterizing moments to elucidate her themes."-Washington City Paper
"Bathsheba Doran has crafted this seemingly simple but gripping 90-minute work from the true story of Susanna Cox"- talkinbroadway.com
"Nest...is no simple costume-drama rendering of [a] young woman's life and death....When the artificial walls of the earlier scenes fall away and the stage is flooded by the cast working as a kind of chorus, one feels the heart of the playwright."- MetroWeekly
Synopsis
5m, 2f / Drama
Based on historical fact, Nest is a taut domestic love triangle set against the landscape of a fledgling nation on the verge of realizing its manifest destiny at a terrible bloody cost. The play re-imagines the real life story of Susanna Cox, a young indentured servant from Pennsylvania who murdered her baby in 1809, and the story of the man who wrote the ballad that was sold at her hanging. The play is a searing exploration of American dreams and violence and their place in the national psyche.
"[Susanna Cox's] tale is uniquely American, involving all our national obsessions: sexuality, class, gender roles, the search for national identity, and, most of all, the insidious, hypocritical piety coded into our cultural DNA...Doran is particularly deft at constructing dialogue filled with small, characterizing moments to elucidate her themes."-Washington City Paper
"Bathsheba Doran has crafted this seemingly simple but gripping 90-minute work from the true story of Susanna Cox"- talkinbroadway.com
"Nest...is no simple costume-drama rendering of [a] young woman's life and death....When the artificial walls of the earlier scenes fall away and the stage is flooded by the cast working as a kind of chorus, one feels the heart of the playwright."- MetroWeekly