Salt Lake City, UT—Meanwhile Park is not a typical theatre. Staged in a small but elegantly designed backyard—originally created by Jeff Paris as a gathering place for friends and neighbors to share stories, laughter, and connection—it began in the summer of 2021 as a casual experiment in community. But it quickly became something more: a space where creativity could thrive, where theatre could be intimate and alive, and where queer stories, tenderness, and absurdity could take center stage.
“Our goal… is to create an environment where theatre—even contemporary, unknown plays—is completely approachable.”
—Jeff Paris in The Utah Review—
This year, Meanwhile Park marked a milestone with its first-ever double-bill premiere, presenting Vacation, written by Nathan Johnson and Red Devil by Andrea Berting—selected from more than 170 submissions for the Meanwhile Park Playwright Prize. As Les Roka notes in The Utah Review, this pairing “confirms how Meanwhile Park has established itself as a well-respected proscenium-less theatrical production venue,” one that draws emerging artists from “two of the nation’s largest creative markets.” With new plays debuting here three summers in a row, Meanwhile has grown from a backyard experiment into one of Utah’s most unique incubators of bold new work.
Founder and producer Jeff Paris put it simply:
“Presenting new plays at Meanwhile Park has been first and foremost fun… bringing diverse groups of playwrights, actors, creative talent, and audiences creates happiness. It’s a reminder that few things are more human than live storytelling.”
—Jeff Paris in The Utah Review—
It was my first time attending Meanwhile Park’s summer showcase—and I didn’t know what I was missing. From the moment the sun slipped behind the trees to the final blackout, the evening felt like a kind of grace: live theatre, queer stories, community, and joy in a world that keeps trying to wear us down. Between the plays, the craft cocktails, and the beautiful mix of people gathered under string lights and stars, it was one of those rare nights that feels like both a gift and an escape.
In times like these, theatre like this isn’t just art. It’s a lifeline. A reminder of what still connects us—and why that connection matters.
Love, Language, and Duct Tape: Vacation as Queer Code-Switching Farce
Presented by Meanwhile Park and Jeff Paris
Written by Nathan Johnson
Directed by Jason Bowcutt
Associate Director: Hannah Orr
Associate Producer: Alexas Lucero
Cast: Alexis Baigue (Barrett), Dan Beecher (James)
Stage Manager: Emily Kitterer
Lighting and Sound: Lee Hollaar
Set Design: Jeff Paris
Costume Design: Dawn McFarland
Graphic Design: Steve Hansen
A winner of the 2025 Meanwhile Park Playwright Prize, Vacation is a razor-sharp queer farce about two bitterly married husbands whose romantic getaway spirals into a darkly comic battle of wits, code-switching, and weaponized love.
Directed with flair by Jason Bowcutt and featuring standout performances from Alexis Baigue as Barrett and Dan Beecher as James, the production delivers a cutting portrait of a queer marriage teetering between performance and implosion.
From the opening moments—James taped to a chair while Barrett sips coffee and reads his newspaper—we know we’re in for a heightened reality. “You’re not tied… you’re taped, darling,” Barrett corrects coolly, signaling the kind of verbal one-upmanship that will characterize the entire play. The kitchen setting, designed by Jeff Paris, is tastefully chic, a perfect metaphor for the couple’s surface-level elegance barely masking a festering power struggle. Lighting and sound design by Lee Hollaar, along with crisp stage management from Emily Kitterer, ensure each beat lands with comic precision.
Performance Highlights – Vacation
The production’s success rests heavily on the dynamic performances of Alexis Baigue and Dan Beecher, who bring Barrett and James to life with cutting precision and theatrical flair. Beecher delivers a standout turn as James, shifting effortlessly between performative fragility—“There’s a light. I’m going to it…”—and simmering menace, wielding a dildo like a saber with comic bravado. Baigue’s Barrett, by contrast, is cool, calculated, and deliciously condescending. Their chemistry crackles, particularly in the physical comedy moments involving a Hummel figurine, a sledgehammer, and the aforementioned dildo—all absurd props that double as metaphors for intimacy turned weapon.
Jeff Paris’s set design cleverly mirrors this dynamic, presenting a tastefully curated vacation cottage that reflects the couple’s polished but hollow marriage. Dawn McFarland’s costume design adds another layer of character—Barrett’s luxurious ensemble and Clive Christian cologne signal performative class and control, while James’s “stressed cashmere” evokes his anxious efforts to keep up. Clothing in this world is both status symbol and shield, functioning as armor and theatrical device alike.
Under Jason Bowcutt’s tight direction, the tone glides effortlessly between biting satire and farce, with choreographed violence and caustic dialogue always landing just right. Every beat—from grammar debates to true crime alibis—is played for laughs, yes, but also for what it reveals beneath: the unbearable tension of a love performed to death.
When Language Fails, the Body Speaks
The central gag—that each man has plotted to murder the other—is absurd, but not random. It functions as an extended metaphor for the slow, mutual erosion of queer intimacy under the pressures of performance, assimilation, and resentment. Their weapons are telling: a Hummel figurine, a sledgehammer, a 12-inch dildo. They’re not just props, but stand-ins for unsaid conversations and love warped into survival. The play is ultimately a parody of white, wealthy, “homonormative” marriage—the kind that mimics heterosexual domesticity but remains haunted by its performativity. The “murder” isn’t just of a spouse—it’s of spontaneity, of desire, of authenticity. Johnson seems to ask: What happens when queer marriage becomes just as hollow, toxic, and image-obsessed as the patriarchal model it once resisted?
The fact that their arguments are so theatrical and eloquent—yet totally unproductive—suggests that language is bankrupt in this relationship. They know how to perform marriage, not how to live it. The absurd physical violence is communication, because it’s the only honest thing left. This turns the spy trope into something poignant: they’re not secret agents; they’re emotionally closeted spouses. The murder plots are metaphors for the ways partners slowly destroy each other when they substitute performance for intimacy.
Queer Domesticity as Parody
And language—precisely, performatively wielded—is their true weapon of choice. “Hadn’t thought of that,” Barrett shrugs after James accuses him of almost blinding him. “If you messed up my face, I’m getting a new one—” James fires back, only to be skewered: “Our wedding album would argue you already have.” Johnson’s dialogue gleams with this kind of bitter sparkle, echoing the tradition of gay camp while exposing its limits. Their clever repartee masks emotional silence, where wit replaces vulnerability and seduction blurs into sabotage.
Beecher’s James is all anxious charm and seductively shifting registers: at one moment playing the wounded lover and the next a sharp-tongued aggressor. Baigue’s Barrett is equal parts smug, scorned, and strangely tender. When he deadpans, “You startled me,” to justify knocking his husband out with a Hummel, you almost believe him.
Yet beneath the farce lies a deeper commentary: Vacation satirizes the psychic toll of queer code-switching. James and Barrett are constantly toggling between postures—flirtation and threat, erudition and vulgarity, tenderness and contempt. Their marriage isn’t just failing; it’s performing itself to death. “You know what’s not normal?” Barrett sneers. “Murder.” But in this world of curated outfits, curated emotions, and curated enemies, murder feels disturbingly close to affection.
Code-Switching as Queer Survival
At its core, Vacation can also be read as a metaphor for queer identity shaped by relentless code-switching—between safety and truth, assimilation and authenticity, desire and legibility. Barrett and James are constantly shifting registers: from Shakespearean and Molière references to sex jokes and insults; from tender gestures to violent threats; from “proper English” grammar debates to campy drag-worthy putdowns.
These shifts mirror the double-consciousness many queer people live with: constantly calibrating how much of themselves is safe to express, when to perform, and when to protect. Even their weapon choices—dildos, antique figurines, a sledgehammer—feel like coded symbols of queer contradiction: sexuality, sentimentality, and rage all colliding.
Their entire marriage is a performance within a performance—not just for each other, but for the heteronormative world that taught them love should look a certain way, be dressed a certain way, behave “properly.”
Barrett’s obsession with status and correctness (“Whom.”), and James’s performance of fragility (“I’m concussed!”), are both acts of survival and power. Together, they create a language—and a war—built from decades of being told that who they are must be negotiated, trimmed, performed.
By the time the couple calls a truce—after multiple attempts on each other’s lives and a deeply passive-aggressive dinner debate (“We’re ordering Chinese.” “I think Italian.” “…Sounds good, dear.”)—we’ve learned not to trust their peace. That’s the brilliance of Johnson’s script: it’s not about who wins. It’s about how long you can keep performing a version of love while suppressing everything that might make it real. In the final moment, James throws the Hummel—a callback to their opening skirmish—hitting Barrett in the head once more. And just like that, the cycle continues.
Vacation asks what happens when the performance becomes indistinguishable from the violence internalized and reproduced.
It’s absurd. It’s tragic. And it’s deeply, disturbingly funny. After the biting wit and volatility of Vacation, Red Devil shifts the emotional register, offering a gentler, yet equally powerful meditation on care, mortality, and kinship in the face of trauma.
About the Playwright: Nathan Johnson (Vacation)
Nathan Johnson is a queer performer/playwright/artist. He was a finalist for the Dramatists Guild Fellowship, a recipient of the National Queer Theatre-WIO Fellowship, a Primary Stages Rockwell Scholar, and a proud winner of the Meanwhile Park Playwright Prize. His plays have been workshopped and/or received finalist positions at The SAUK, The Artistic Home, B Street Theatre, American Stage, Oculus Theatre Company, The Chain Theatre, Penny Templeton Studio, and the Magnetic Theatre.
MFA Columbia University. Nathan is a lifelong champion of the underdog and a believer in unicorns. @nathanwalnut on socials
Red Devil: Crosswords, Chemo, and Queer Love
Presented by Meanwhile Park and Jeff Paris
Written by Andrea Berting
Directed by Teresa Sanderson
Associate Director: Hannah Orr
Associate Producer: Alexas Lucero
Cast: Vicki Pugmire (Val), Reb Fleming (Rose), and Laura Elise Chapman (Emmie)
Stage Manager: Emily Kitterer
Lighting & Sound: Lee Hollaar
Set Design: Jeff Paris
Costume Design: Dawn McFarland
Graphic Design: Steve Hansen
The second prizewinner, Red Devil by Andrea Berting, is a tender dramedy set in a chemo room, where two cancer patients in their 70s and a new diagnosed Gen Z influencer form an unlikely bond through grief, humor, and care.
Originally developed at a new play incubator and shaped by Berting’s personal experience with breast cancer, Red Devil expands on themes she explored in her earlier screenwriting. Her feature screenplay Breast in Show won Best Comedy Feature at the 2022 Richmond International Film Festival and earned her a spot as an ISA Fast Track Fellow.
As Rose and Val—two women in their seventies with sharply contrasting temperaments—navigate cancer treatment and the shadows of past heartbreak, their quiet routine is upended by Emmie, a vivacious 23-year-old influencer whose polished social media persona conceals a deep, aching loneliness. Rose is a no-nonsense, crossword-obsessed butch lesbian who prefers her solitude—and her water without ice. Her sparring partner and seatmate, Val, is a warm, terminally ill flower child who keeps answering clues Rose can’t solve.
“That’s what they called the drugs. Red Devils. Not because they were evil, but because they were fierce. Because they went in red, and they burned like hell, and they made you lose your hair and your taste and your balance. But they fought. They fought for you. And if you let them, they did their job.”
—Val (Reb Fleming)
At first, their interactions are defined by friction and misunderstanding—Emmie’s performative positivity jars against Rose’s blunt realism and Val’s calm endurance. But as they settle into each other’s rhythms, what begins as banter and clashing values slowly blossoms into friendship, mutual care, and unexpected romance. Each woman brings her own grief into the room—whether it’s the loss of a partner, a collapsing marriage, or a vanishing social circle—and Red Devil allows those wounds to be held, not hidden. With sharp dialogue, intergenerational wit, and a beautiful final twist, the play becomes a love story about survival, visibility, and dancing through grief. One of its greatest strengths is how it stages difficult conversations about mortality—not as melodrama, but as a kind of care work.
Performance Highlights – Red Devil
The chemistry between the cast is the emotional engine of the production, and in this case, it’s nothing short of exceptional. Vicki Pugmire’s Rose is both guarded and hilarious, wielding her dry wit like a shield while allowing flashes of quiet vulnerability to deepen the play’s emotional weight. Reb Fleming’s Val is luminous, radiating calm strength and grounding each moment with a spiritual warmth that makes every crossword clue feel like a small act of grace. And Laura Elise Chapman, as Emmie, is a revelation—balancing manic influencer energy with a sharp comedic instinct and a surprising emotional depth, especially in her moments of stillness. The performances never feel theatrical in the pejorative sense; they feel lived-in, tender, and brave. Together, this trio doesn’t just carry the show—they elevate it into something deeply resonant.
Director Teresa Sanderson crafts a rhythm that never rushes the quiet or undercuts the humor, allowing Berting’s script to breathe—especially in scenes where silence, touch, or a well-timed laugh speaks volumes. The production’s design is delicately attuned to this emotional world: Jeff Paris’s minimalist infusion room set—three chairs, three poles—grounds the story in reality while giving the characters space to evolve. Dawn McFarland’s costumes subtly mark identity and transformation. Lee Hollaar’s lighting and sound offer emotional punctuation without distraction, and stage manager Emily Kitterer ensures each transition lands with clarity. One standout sequence, an IV-pole dance to “Poison” by Rita Ora, turns camp into catharsis, capturing the show’s rare ability to hold humor and heartbreak in the same breath.
Beyond the Ribbon: Confronting the Realities of Illness
One of Red Devil’s most piercing moments arrives late in the play, when Emmie—usually upbeat and camera-ready—lets the mask slip. “All the, like—pink ribbon warrior sisters bullshit just pisses me off so much,” she admits. “This is ugly… and, I don’t know. People need to see it for what it is—a tragedy.” Delivered with raw honesty by Chapman, the moment cuts through cultural platitudes surrounding breast cancer, exposing the emotional and physical toll so often sanitized by awareness campaigns and hashtagged optimism.
“Barely anyone in the online community even talks about Stage 4. It’s awful. Did you know that one in three women with early stage breast cancer will eventually have it return metastasized? . . . All the, like– pink ribbon warrior sisters bullshit just pisses me off so much. This is ugly, and– and, I don’t know. People need to see it for what it is–a tragedy.”
Emmie (Laura Elise Chapman)
Earlier in the show, the constant ringing of the cancer unit’s “victory bell” is introduced—not as a celebration, but as a haunting refrain that’s meant to symbolize recovery but gradually becomes a cruel reminder of who gets to leave, and who doesn’t. For Rose, the bell is not a source of celebration but a symbol of exclusion. “I told the nurse I won’t be ringing it. As a protest,” she says simply. Her refusal becomes a quiet act of resistance—against narratives that celebrate survival while ignoring those still in treatment, in recurrence, or facing terminal diagnoses.
This ritualized bell toll becomes a sonic erasure—celebration without space for grief. Through Rose’s quiet resistance and Emmie’s unraveling, Red Devil exposes the gap between curated survival stories and the messy truths of recurrence, fear, and mortality.
This sonic motif—the bell—functions not just as background, but as thematic counterpoint. It becomes a ritualized sound of erasure: celebration without space for grief, a signal that some stories are worth ringing for while others are left unheard.
This scene—and Chapman’s performance—lays bare one of the play’s central tensions: the gap between curated narratives and lived experience. Emmie, who has spent much of the play projecting control and visibility through social media, finally acknowledges the exhaustion and fear lurking beneath the surface. In doing so, she echoes a broader critique embedded in Berting’s script: that survival stories are often flattened into slogans, while the messier truths—recurrence, mortality, ambivalence—go unspoken.
By challenging these tropes, Red Devil refuses easy comfort. Instead, it offers something braver: a space to grieve, rage, and still reach for connection in the face of uncertainty. The result is not just a play about illness—it’s a meditation on how we live and love alongside it.
“Red Devil becomes something rare: a story that leaves the room quieter, more open, and maybe—just maybe—more willing to love without guarantees.”
Red Devil doesn’t offer the impossible—the promise of a happy ending. Instead, it sits with what’s fragile and unresolved—the diagnoses we can’t outrun, the words we almost say, the people we might still become. It’s a play that makes space for laughter alongside grief, care alongside fear. Raw and resonant, it leans into the vulnerability of bodies and relationships under pressure, refusing to simplify what it means to keep living while letting go. In its honesty, Red Devil becomes something rare: a story that leaves the room quieter, more open, and maybe—just maybe—more willing to love without guarantees.
About the Playwright: Andrea Berting (Red Devil)
Andrea Berting is a longtime theatre professional who spent most of her career backstage—until a global pandemic pushed her to pick up the pen. Since then, she hasn’t looked back. Her feature screenplay Breast in Show won Best Comedy Feature at the 2022 Richmond International Film Festival and earned her a spot as an ISA Fast Track Fellow. A graduate of VCU with a BFA in Theater Education, Andrea now lives in Chicago with her husband and rescue dog. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter: @andreaberting.
Final Thoughts
Selected from a competitive global pool, these two plays exemplify the kind of theatre this festival was created to uplift: bold, intimate, and deeply human. Each is a quiet, radical act of theatre. That these stories were chosen together speaks volumes about the committee’s vision: a contemporary theatre that doesn’t shy away from risk or complexity, but leans into both with empathy and intention.
“These aren’t just entertaining one-acts—they’re acts of connection.”
These plays invite us to laugh, reflect, and reimagine how love, conflict, and care can be staged. Seeing queer stories treated with such nuance, humor, and heart—and given the space to shine in tandem—is a rare and vital gift.
Sincere thanks to the 2025 Meanwhile Park Playwright Prize committee—Jerry Rapier, Kelly Hindley, Jill Bumgardner, and Matthew Ivan Bennett—for their thoughtful selection and ongoing commitment to nurturing new theatrical voices. Their curatorial choices help ensure that the stage remains a space for complexity, authenticity, and community.
About This Event
Dates: July 10–20, 2025 | 8:30 PM | Meanwhile Park
🎟️ Tickets: $42.00
Includes drinks and snacks. Advance purchase required—no door sales.
🎫 Limited tickets remain for July 17-20.
👉 Click here to purchase
This is a private, 21+ event. No early entry. No exceptions.
Doors open at 8:30 PM. Come early for drinks, snacks, and a summer evening of bold new theatre.
One-of-a-kind outdoor theatre experience featuring two world-premiere plays under the stars. Chosen from over 170 submissions to the 2025 Meanwhile Park Playwright Prize, this double feature includes:
– Vacation by Nathan Johnson – a sharp, darkly funny gay “spy vs. spy” comedy
– Red Devil by Andrea Berting – a heartwarming, queer intergenerational story set in a chemo room
🔞 Content Warning: Intended for mature audiences. Contains adult language, sexual themes, and discussions of illness and mortality.
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