Things That Break

When you make glass for a living, your body breaks. Victor, the last in a long line of glassmakers, lies under the knife on the operating table for heart and lung surgery, while his family waits to know if he will live or die. An inside-out surrealist ride on the wishes and fears of a family as they wait in a hospital waiting room, where every thought and terror becomes manifest. It is a play about the end of the American manufacturing era, a postmodern history of glass making, and a tale about the need we have to turn the story of our breakable lives into an unbreakable story.

   “Sherry Kramer’s THINGS THAT BREAK is a terribly difficult, painfully beautiful play in which everything is broken.

   The storytelling is jagged, taking surreal twists as it shifts back and forth between the worried wife of a man having heart surgery and her grown son and daughter…

   This is a wildly imaginative piece of work…

   …listening to Miss Kramer’s kaleidoscopic language…is like being under some hallucinogenic anesthetic…”

Nelson Pressley, The Washington Times

   “You may have heard that playwright Sherry Kramer is biting off more than she can chew in THINGS THAT BREAK, her free-form comedy about sibling rivalry, heart surgery, and the American dream. Don’t believe it. The lady chews like a champion.

   Chomps, actually, greedily bobbling up insights that would surely escape lesser writers, just as she did when introducing the metaphysics-obsessed lesbian lovers of DAVID’S REDHAIRED DEATH…”

Bob Mondello, CityPaper