Following the sold-out run of “Abigail’s Party” last fall, The Barrow Group Theatre Company and The Pond Theatre Company reunite to present the New York premiere of “Muswell Hill” by Torben Betts.

Set in the leafy north London suburb of Muswell Hill, a dinner party turns dangerously fraught, yet increasingly comical, as the host and guests rattle their upper middle class complacency to a point of no return. Amidst this domestic disaster, an earthquake in a developing nation rocks the rest of the world. How can they justify their everyday worries in an ever more fragile world?

Torben Betts is a multi award-winning British playwright, described by Alan Ayckbourn as “one of the most exciting theatre writing talents I have come across in many a year.”

It’s been said that people congregate in kitchens at dinner parties because the food-prep area is a “backstage” space, somewhere where folks can be their authentic selves. In the kitchen, you don’t need to put forward the formal, public persona you use in the living room or dining room. The Barrow Group Theatre Company and the Pond Theatre Company’s joint production of Muswell Hill, by British playwright Torben Betts, is set entirely in a kitchen. This often-trenchant 2012 drama explores the disconnectedness that pervades our lives in the cyber age. The play’s North London dinner party turns out to be a most unpleasant affair, one at which everyone present comes off as superficial, judgmental, self-absorbed, and/or more interested in tech gadgets and wireless plans than in thoughtful human interaction. In other words, the characters’ authentic kitchen selves are hot messes. The party’s hosts are a young married couple, Jess (Colleen Clinton) and Mat (Jason Alan Carvell). She has a lucrative career in accounting; he’s a long-aspiring novelist. Just as the soiree is about to get underway, he tells her that he’s heard she’s been having an affair with another man. She refuses to discus …Read more