by Adrian Shirk & Kristin McCalley

​​December 10, 7pm

Enoch’s

480 10th Ave, NYC

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The Sleepover is a work-in-progress of devised theater from The Party, led by Adrian Shirk and Kristin McCalley. Inspired by the feminist histories of American prophetesses in Adrian Shirk’s And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy and Mary Catherine Bateson’s anthropology of her four best friends Composing a Life, The Sleepover invites audiences into a meta-narrative slumber party where each guest has arrived with a distinct foundational belief—whether theological, political, familial—that she no longer wants to have, and which throughout the night she will struggle to reinterpret. 

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In this 60-minute workshop production, Adrian Shirk and Kristin McCalley present new material developed over 2024. Tonight, The Sleepover picks up in a small, softly-lit space–a living room floor, a pond-side gazebo–where two guests have stayed up long past everyone else. The past, present and future collide. They realize they are the authors of this story. They are no longer 7th graders, but instead their adult selves. In those quiet, psychedelic hours, the two guests cycle through fragmented dialogues, seances, role-playing exercises, PowerPoint presentations, fridge lists, ritual movement, and A/V recordings from their personal archives, grappling with gendered experiences of privacy, shame, autonomy and the long shadow of fundamentalism. In a race against sunrise to seek answers, their attempts yield increasingly surprising and unsettling results. The alchemical communion of their sleepover allows them to finally ask each other: What do you believe? Why do you believe it? Qui bono (who benefits)? 

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This production of The Sleepover is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. 

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Production History:

The Living Room, Stamford, The Party, December 2024

Kindling Arts Festival, The Barbershop Theater, Nashville, The Party, July 2023

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Cast and Crew Bios

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Adrian Shirk is a writer and theater artist. She is the author of the books Heaven is a Place on Earth (Counterpoint, 2022), a personal odyssey of American utopian experiments, and And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy (Counterpoint, 2017), a hybrid-memoir exploring American women prophets and mystics, named an NPR ‘Best Book’ of 2017. She teaches in Pratt Institute’s Writing Department and represents select projects at Driftless Literary. She is an ensemble member of The Party, with whom she devises original theatrical productions that have been supported by New York State Council of the Arts, Delaware County Arts Grants, Roxbury Arts Group, Kindling Arts, Prattsville Arts Center and Pratt Faculty Development Awards. She lives in the Catskill mountains at the cooperative arts hub The Mutual Aid Society.

Kristin McCalley is an actor, director, producer and devising-artist, and has worked with companies such as Nashville Children’s Theatre, Blackbird Theatre, Playhouse Nashville, Actor’s Bridge, and her own production company, The Party (501c3). McCalley served for several years as an actor at Ingram New Works Festival, a new play incubator hosting playwrights such as Sarah Ruhl, Donald Margulies, and Christopher Durang. Recent directorial work includes the Nashville premiere of the Pulitzer prize-winning play Ironbound by Martyna Majok (Nashville Story Garden); Airswimming by Charlotte Jones (The Party); a workshop production of an original work, The Sleepover (Kindling/The Party); and three consecutive years of an immersive series of original mini-performances, Microcosm (The Mutual Aid Society/The Party; 2022, 2023, 2024). In 2018, McCalley produced an ensemble-devised production of Charles Mee’s Big Love (The Party), which Jeff Ellis at Broadway World called, “the most talked about production of 2018 to date.”