Inferna

“Those who cannot understand the past are doomed to repeat it.”

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We may not know exactly who first said this phrase, but it may be the truest thing that has ever been spoken. And in this present era, when many seem hell-bent on forgetting — or ignoring — the past, we find ourselves reliving atrocities we thought were long left behind.

 

This is why I wrote Inferna.

 

Though this narrative may be fictional, everything these characters go through on this stage really happened. It happened over and over again for a period of over 100 years, and it happened all over the world.

 

Inferna is a play about trauma, and how that trauma follows us as we move through a world that is not built to make space for it, despite inflicting it on us endlessly. The stage on which this story takes life reflects that. You will see fragments of worlds, of past and present, bleeding into each other, encroaching on one another. No one is given space to breathe.

 

So as you watch this story come to life, I’d like to ask you to not look away; to watch this story encased in snow, frozen in time, and sit with the fact that this really happened.

 

Because unless we all understand that, we risk doing this all over again.