At a middle school in this seaside town, the unthinkable has happened, placing a bewildered community in the national spotlight. Stuck at home in a state of shocked limbo, Julie and Zander, two twelve-year-olds, try to make sense of the chaos they witnessed, their awkward crushes, and an infinitely more complicated future — but the grown-ups are no help at all. An urgent response to our times, This Flat Earth is a startling and deeply felt story of growing up in our confounding world.

Running Time: 90 minutes, no intermission

A great play is like a great voyage: terrifying in its vastness, simultaneously bewildering and thrilling. Such is the journey of Lindsey Ferrentino’s This Flat Earth at Playwrights Horizons, under the commanding and assured helm of director Rebecca Taichman. That there is a most exquisite and singular reveal near the end of this play, a heartrending coming of age story surrounding a middle school shooting, is one of Taichman’s trademarks and, like her Tony-winning Broadway debut with the miraculous play Indecent, the results here are thrilling. I am a writer who loves to stand in awe of my fellow creatives, who have challenged us to see the world we’ve made anew. In our current zeitgeist, there are teams of creatives like Taichman and Ferrentino, who work from the heart and the mind simultaneously to cause you to reexamine your complacency and call forth your better angels. With This Flat Earth they’ve hit the mark precisely. The plot revolves around Julie, a middle school girl (played with adolescent angst and white hot rage by Ella Kennedy Davis) who, with her buddy Zander (played with chivalrous charm by Ian Saint-Germain), has survived a school shooting. Their former classmate …Read more