The Plumbing Tree at Highways Performance Space and Gallery

The Plumbing Tree is a political science fiction that explores ideas of queer familial structures, polarizing political ideologies and social contagions. The play is told through the perspectives of an eccentric family plagued by dogma, and composed of three acts, each narrated by Miasma, the personification of a smell. What appears to be an episode of sibling rivalry as presented on a sitcom television show, gradually shatters into contagious pandemonium after the family is poisoned by methane gas from a plumbing disaster in their front lawn. In the flood of excrement, the family descends into a collective hallucination. Madness and despair gifts each member of the household with a lucidity that radically calls into question each of their world views. Medium Judith is a host for an interdisciplinary methodology for writing experimental theater works. The company originated in 2012 in Baltimore, MD with works composed by Bryan Collins and Amanda Horowitz. Their collaboration began as an urgent response to emergent political tools of the internet and their recombinant effects on power. Backdropped by this changing political landscape, they debuted Shy World (2013), a one-act play satirizing the conditions of the surveillance state, internet addiction and online activism. Through a process that utilizes conceptual sculpture, joke writing and concept-map making, Medium Judith creates a queer theater in which cultural signifiers are transmuted and recomposed into an experimental world logic and value system.