The Sleepover

The Sleepover | at Enoch’s
Tuesday, December 10th
6:30 – 8:00p | 480 10th Ave, NYC (btwn 36th & 37th)
TICKETS / $10

The Sleepover is a work-in-progress of devised theater from The Party, led by Adrian Shirk and Kristin McCalley. Inspired by the feminist histories of American prophetesses in Adrian Shirk’s And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy and Mary Catherine Bateson’s anthropology of her four best friends Composing a Life, The Sleepover invites audiences into a meta-narrative slumber party where each guest has arrived with a distinct foundational belief–whether theological, political, familial–that she no longer wants to have, and which throughout the night she will struggle to reinterpret.

In this 60-minute workshop production, Adrian Shirk and Kristin McCalley perform new material they’ve developed over 2024. Tonight, The Sleepover picks up in a small, softly-lit space–a living room floor, a pond-side gazebo–where two guests have stayed up long past everyone else. The past, present and future collide. They realize they are the authors of this story. In those quiet, psychedelic hours, the two guests cycle through fragmented dialogues, seances, role-playing exercises, PowerPoint presentations, fridge lists, therapeutic clowning, and A/V recordings from their personal archives, grappling with gendered experiences of privacy, shame, autonomy and the long shadow of fundamentalism. In a race against sunrise to seek answers, their attempts yield increasingly surprising and unsettling results. The alchemical communion of their sleepover allows them to finally ask each other: What do you believe? Why do you believe it? Qui bono (who benefits)?

This production of The Sleepover is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, with special thanks to The Segue Foundation.