Holden
ABOUT THE SHOW
Scott’s Role - Deviser/Performer
Holden was written and directed by Anisa George in collaboration with the ensemble. This one-act play is a meditation on J.D. Salinger’s masterwork, “The Catcher in the Rye,” its enduring influence, and its mysterious link to a contagion of assassinations and mass shootings in America. The play plumbs the psychic depths of this troubling literary hero and his highly disturbed super fans, revealing the paradoxical relationship between their alternating urges to create and destroy. Trapped as figments in Salinger’s writing bunker, Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley Jr. join Salinger in parallel monasticism, urging him to publish the works he’s been secretly writing in his New Hampshire bunker for the past forty years, but Salinger will not listen. One day, a new visitor joins the unruly masculine gang, and through his mutterings, we begin to see a new evolutionary strain of the 20th century assassin: a menacing shadow side of Holden that looks to leave a more monstrous mark on the world. Holden offers up the promise of radical redemption while facing the heartbreaking tragedy of mass shooting as status quo.
“[Holden]…leaves you in a disturbing grip.”
— New York Times