Avant Bard’s Scripts in Play Festival is an annual new play development program dedicated to supporting bold new works that engage with classical themes, texts, and ideas. Through free staged readings, collaborative rehearsal, and audience conversation, the festival gives playwrights an opportunity to hear their work aloud, explore it with a director and actors, and continue refining the script in process.
Adapted and reimagined for our time from Henrik Ibsen’s classic An Enemy of the People, Gracie vs. The People explores public health, inconvenient science, the responsibility of the press, and the cost of confronting unpopular truths. Retaining Ibsen’s central story while adding a lively splash of absurdism and contemporary humor, the play asks: When science meets politics, who wins? When the people and things important to you are threatened, what do you do?
Set in a high school where toxins in the walls may be transforming the DNA of students and teachers into unrecognizable creatures, Gracie vs. The People examines hierarchy and power, democratic ideals in everyday life, the manipulation of the language of freedom, and the press’s claim to offer perfectly unbiased fairness to both sides—all within a setting ripe for humor audiences will recognize.