Studio Nights: FEATS Double Bill

Accelerated Intimacy, by Chiara Venturini, won the 2018 FEATS award for best original script. It is being directed by Carrie Ellwanger, who also brought the play to FEATS that year. It tells the story of two complete strangers who are stuck in a disabled New York City subway car. To pass the time and relieve the awkwardness, they decide to take a quiz they find in a discarded newspaper: a series of questions designed to “accelerate intimacy” between strangers. It's a premise both find mildly amusing - okay, maybe a little intriguing - as good a remedy for boredom as anything else, right? Certainly nothing more than that...  

Baby Boom, by emerging American playwright Lia Romeo, directed by Jeremy Zeegers, is this year's ATC entry at FEATS, taking place in Bad Homburg, Germany 26-29 May. The play is a delightfully quirky, darkly comic, and ultimately tragic exploration of the normalization of guns in American culture. It peeks beneath the facade of suburban utopia and into the lives of two young American families. Through a series of twists and turns, the story features heartbreak, a yearning for family, a flickering love, the desire to be understood, the need for community, and an innocent gun.

FEATS is an annual festival and competition which brings together 12 anglophone theater companies from across Europe. Each group presents a one-act play over four nights of performances. The festival also features a professional adjudicator who awards prizes in a range of categories. The ATC has been a frequent award winner over the years, most recently in Antwerp in 2018 with "best original script" for Accelerated Intimacy. We are excited to give our Brussels audience a chance to see both plays in the context of Studio Nights, our format dedicated to emerging talents.