(**This project is currently being developed as part of the Orchard Project Greenhouse.)

“red room” takes as its focal point water, particularly its relationship with Latin America through privatization and neoliberal intervention. The personification of Water itself acts as a gender-neutral omniscient narrator, guiding us throughout the play.

In New York, we meet Inés and Santiago, activists that find themselves pushed over the edge of the Lower East Side dam, floating in an artificial reservoir constructed above Brooklyn—alongside Santiago’s enigmatic gringo boyfriend, Leo.

Inés washes up in Central America, where Subcomandante Gloria, a water guerrillera, attempts and fails to explode an American dam rerouting freshwater.

Emerging from the artificial reservoir, Santiago and Leo find themselves in D.C., in a “red room”: a room in the Pentagon illuminated by a Big Red Button, the logical, destructive end of Manifest Destiny. The central drama of the play coalesces in understanding neoliberalism’s global violence, and the play ends, as we all could, under warm, rising tides.