Christmas Eve. Bettina and her husband Albert aren’t happy. Bettina’s mother is staying for the holidays. Which is awkward. Not least because Bettina’s mother met a man on the train. And now she’s invited him around for drinks…

Family, betrayal and the inescapable presence of the past reverberate through this razor-sharp comedy from Roland Schimmelpfennig, the most-performed playwright in Germany.

Ana Graham is a director, actor, translator and costume designer born in Mexico City. She is Artistic Producer and Founder of Mexico-based Por Piedad Teatro where she has developed most of her work. Since 2009, she splits her time working in Mexico City and in New York City, where Por Piedad Teatro partnered with The Play Company to present Ettore Scola’s Working On a Special Day in New York at 59E59 and The Duchamp Syndrome at The Flea. In 2017 Graham and collaborator Antonio Vega co-directed and performed in Mexico City, Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play Winter Solstice. As an actor she has performed in more than twenty plays. In 2005 Graham received an Ariel nomination as Best Actress for her role in the movie Mezcal directed by Ignacio Ortiz.

The Attic, a dark comedy, provocatively imagines a society in which people lose the ability to cope with the pressures of everyday life and withdraw into tiny structures, called attics, manufactured by a mysterious corporation. The play examines the growing social phenomenon of “hikikomori” (acute social withdrawal) in Japan.

A young man embarks on a quest to find the source of these attics after his brother commits suicide in one. A teenage girl living in an attic writes in her diary comparing herself to Anne Frank. A mysterious man who seems linked to the attics may be a guide to another world. A kidnapper locks a girl in his attic for years. Along the way to discovering the attics’ source, we meet samurais, polar explorers, soldiers fighting a multi-national war, and many other commonplace and fantastical characters.

Tyler Micoleau designed the lighting for PlayCo’s 2007 production of The Attic.

Originally from Maine, lighting designer Tyler Micoleau has lived in Brooklyn for the last 26 years. He has designed extensively throughout New York Off-Broadway, as well as regionally and internationally, for world premiere plays, musicals and operas as well as outdoor spaces and touring productions. He is the recipient of a Tony Award (for The Band’s Visit), two Lucille Lortel Awards, two Henry Hewes Design Awards, and two Village Voice OBIE awards.

Recent designs include Be More Chill on Broadway and London’s West End, the Public Theater / Disney musical Hercules in Central Park, Harvey Fierstein’s Bella Bella for Manhattan Theatre Club and the revival of Christopher Shinn’s Dying City at Second Stage Theater. Postponed or cancelled productions include David Mamet’s American Buffalo on Broadway, a remounting of Annie Baker’s The Antipodes in Los Angeles and the New York premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s Becky Nurse of Salem for Lincoln Center Theater.