THE STORY: It’s the winter of 2040, and the world has changed—but maybe not by much. Timothy’s wife has just left him, and he isn’t taking it well. His sisters, Tara and Kris, are trying to help him cope while wrestling with their own lives and loves. The three of them seem to spend a lot of time in their basements, and the kids are starting to ask questions. This subterranean comedy explores how one family hangs on when technology fails and communication breaks down.
“This smart, disturbing comedy is set in 2040, just far enough in the future to be intriguingly weird but close enough to the present to be distressingly familiar…Posner’s revelations about this brave new world, touching on the linguistic, the sociological, and the theological, waver between the explicit and the mysterious, and each scene…gives us something funny and scary to ponder.” —The New Yorker.
“Despite [his] technological prophecies, Posner wants his play to demonstrate that some all-too-human impulses will never be stamped out…The mores and means of human ties may change, JUDY seems to say, but the need for love and understanding never will.” —The Village Voice.
“JUDY…unfolds within the finished basements of three adult siblings. They mostly communicate through a tablet/computer…called the System, which, ominously, fails often. [JUDY gets] the kind of playing that happens in finished basements: dress-up, kissing practice, channeling the dead…Under the aegis of harmless make-believe (‘just pretending’), something heavy can emerge…[Max Posner shows that] performance remains a better communication technology than anything else…” —N+1.
