by Beth Hyland. Directed by Ludmila de Brito.

About the Show

It's Family Weekend at Hollybrook Knolls Residential Treatment Center. Caroline is visiting her
younger sister, high school senior Isabella. Isabella has a lot to say. Caroline doesn't want to hear
any of it, but maybe she'll learn the TikTok dance Isabella wants to teach her. A darkly comic
exploration of sisterhood and mental illness, grippy sock vacation explores the secrets we can't
afford to keep. 

Content Warning

grippy sock vacation discusses the following topics: suicide and suicidality, self-harm, depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, OCD, mental illness stigma, eating disorders, postpartum depression.

Director's Note

Family; How do we navigate generations of collective unprocessed pain, and how long is survival mode sustainable? 

When did we inherit the need to pretend everything is okay?  

The stigma of mental illness across cultures and generations is something that I had to personally fight against and grapple with myself this past year after being diagnosed with depression and anxiety on top of ADHD and getting family backlash for considering treatment. 

Among the many divides in this country, we see generational polarization. 

Grippy Sock Vacation by Beth Hyland holds your heart and shakes it to the beat of a Tik-Tok viral dance. Caroline and Isabella, Gen Z’er and Millennial sisters, fight to connect across generational trauma in our tech dystopia to remind us that there is always something we must learn from each other. 

Thank you for being here.

The Cast

Isabella - Sabrina Liu

Caroline - Iris Feng

Isabella Understudy - Mawce Dunn

Caroline Understudy - Vivian White

The Creative Team

About The Director

Ludmila de Brito is a Brazilian director of Indigenous descent who loves telling stories. Her heart steers towards politically urgent work and plays that ask us to transcend the conditioning of surviving. "When do we start living?"

Beth Hyland is a playwright and screenwriter most recently based in Chicago. Her plays, which include Fires, Ohio, SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA, Seagulls, Killed a Man (Joking), and All-One! The Dr. Bronner’s Play, have been produced and developed at Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf LookOut, Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Kennedy Center, The Hearth, Rivendell Theatre, B Street Theatre, Know Theatre, The Sound (in association with Joe Swanberg), and First Floor Theater, among others. She is the 2023 recipient of KCACTF’s Paul Vogel Award and the Mark Twain Prize for Comic Playwriting. She is a 1st-year Playwriting MFA candidate at UC San Diego. Representation: Jamie Kaye-Phillips and Andrew Minkin, UTA. bethhyland.com  

Just the Two of Us

by Mylan Gray. Directed by Allie Moss.

About the Show

It's Ryan's first day at a mysterious office where Black men occasionally fight each other to the
death. David, the old-timer, does all he can to stay on top, but can't keep up to save his life. In a
world that encourages Black men to kill each other to survive, Boxed asks if it's possible for
Black men to love each other in the face of state-sanctioned brutality and a culture where lethal
violence is an everyday reality.

Director's Note

Boxed is a play for our times. We witness David and Ryan, two Black “employees” in what seems like the office from hell. They must navigate the dangerously arbitrary rules of their surroundings that encourage them to undermine each other in order to get ahead.  To me, this is the crux of the play: patriarchal white supremacy thrives when marginalized groups (in this play, specifically Black men) are prevented from collaborating and creating community. This feels especially relevant in 2023, as we continue to march through the violent backlash against the “woke” progress that was almost made during the so-called racial reckoning of 2020. We’re deep in a culture of gaslighting and lies packaged as truths designed to undermine the very real experiences of racism and anti-Black violence. These lies also purposefully obfuscate the persistent, calculated tradition of this violence in our country by placing it squarely in the realm of “history,” seemingly far away and disconnected from our current situation. This play brings it to the fore and serves as a stark reminder that our history is not as far behind as we are encouraged to think it. In doing so, it exposes the sinisterly intertwined lineage of racism and capitalism. Both are far-reaching systems deeply entrenched in American life and psyche, and Boxed poses the question: given all of this, can you ever really get out?

Content Warning

 The Cast

About the Director

Allie Moss is a first-year MFA student originally from Columbus, Ohio. Prior to attending UCSD, she was based in San Francisco. Bay Area directing credits include Far Away (A.C.T. MFA Program), Restoration Master Reset (Cutting Ball Theater), Cloud 9 and American Hero (Custom Made Theatre Co.), and Hookman (A.C.T. Young Conservatory). Allie also served as the literary manager and casting associate at American Conservatory Theater, where she dramaturged mainstage productions, co-produced A.C.T.'s annual New Strands Festival, wrote A.C.T's policy on casting ethics, cast mainstage shows, and taught audition prep classes for high school, undergraduate, and graduate acting students. Allie has a BA in Theater from Goucher College and is an associate member of SDC.

About The Playwright

Mylan Gray is a recent graduate of Stanford University where he studied Black Studies and Playwriting with Young Jean Lee. He was the recipient of the Kennel Jackson Jr. Departmental Award for his Honors Thesis play, Buried in Blood: an afro-surrealist conjuring, healing ancestral wounds. He was also the 2023 recipient of KCACTF’s Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award. Buried in Blood recently received a reading in his hometown of Kansas City. Mylan is a new member of the Tank Theatre’s LIT Council, a playwriting group for Men of Color. He is a 1st-year Playwriting MFA candidate at UC San Diego.