Polaroid Stories

Director: Catalina Beltrán
Playwright: Naomi Iizuka

Content advisory: Polaroid Stories contains depictions of violence, including sexual violence; physical and verbal harassment; substance use; and derogatory language related to race, gender, and sexuality. The play also deals with loss, grief, and themes of mental health. Scenes include physical intimacy.

A group of young people gathers in an abandoned mansion, drawn together by a charismatic host who fills the house with music, drugs, and the promise of belonging. Over the course of an endless night, their stories unspool. Stories of desire, loss, violence, and survival that echo the oldest myths we know.

Polaroid Stories, written by Naomi Iizuka, weaves characters from Greek and Roman mythology — Orpheus, Eurydice, Persephone, Narcissus — into the raw, urgent language of the streets. Among them are people who have always been at the mercy of those with power: the ones the gods consume and discard, then and now. This production sets the play in a decaying neoclassical building where reason has long since been abandoned, and where the past and the present collapse into each other. The violence here is ancient. It is also happening right now.

Director Statement:

Polaroid Stories found me at a moment when the oldest stories felt unbearably current. Naomi Iizuka's text lives in the tension between myth and the present tense, between the archetypes that have organized human experience for centuries and the people who are still paying the price for them today.

This production is set in an abandoned neoclassical mansion, a space once built to project authority, reason, and order, and since left to rot. A wealthy young man has claimed it as his kingdom, filling it with endless parties, drugs, and people who depend on him. Through his world move gods, outcasts, and the powerless, not as symbols, but as people with bodies and voices and hungers. What interests me about that image is what it reveals: those grand spaces have always belonged to men, and what they housed behind the columns was never just civilization. Right now, that is more visible than ever. The contempt is open. The violence is undisguised.

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LATE SEATING - DISCRETION OF THE HOUSE MANAGER