About the Show

Part of Summerworks 2022, Clubbed Thumb's twice-delayed 25th mini-season of new plays.

A dark comedy by Gab Reisman that takes place in a cottage surrounded by endless siege, at the dawn of Modern Capitalism, as a motley group of women tell tales and do what they need to do to survive until the Market reopens. The play explores what it means to be trapped indoors.

Tamilla Woodard, chair of the acting program at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University, directs.

With Summerworks, Clubbed Thumb produces three new plays, each of which runs for two weeks. Some playwrights had their professional premieres at Summerworks include Will Arbery, Jaclyn Backhaus, Clare Barron and Gina Gionfriddo.

Critic Reviews (2)

"Reisman has a couple of big themes in mind — the transition from an artisan economy to a capitalist one, the role of women in war. But the Marxist analytics are pretty limited. And the depredations of war (embodied in the arrival of a young soldier, played by Seth Clayton) are never staged with enough realism to fully register."
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"'Spindle Shuttle Needle' uses modern language, modern character sensibilities, and a modern, nonliteral approach to casting to great effect; Reisman and Woodard operate deftly in the gap between one period and the other. ... And the control of tone is very tight—it would be easy for the sharp irony to turn into cheap jokes, but it never does."
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Trailer

Creative team