About the Show

A group of clever artists, scientists, searchers, and more balance uncertainty amidst a pandemic.

In a thematic continuation of Part 1 of The Lanford Wilson Project, Sympathetic Magic follows a group of intense and clever San Franciscan artisans, spiritual seekers, and lost souls combatting artistic failure and scientific uncertainty in the midst of a pandemic. Over the course of the play, they must endeavor in their fierce and lively ways to overcome the tragedies of the past.

Lanford Wilson, one of the founders of the Circle Repertory Company and a Pulitzer Prize winner, developed his work within the historic context of the Off-Off Broadway theatre movement. The Lanford Wilson Project is a continuation of that legacy.

Critic Reviews (2)

A new theater company, Open Circle Play Factory, has been formed to reassess his work and those of other writers from the Circle Repertory Company which he helped found. Their inaugural endeavor is aptly called “The Lanford Wilson Project” including revivals of his The Mound Builders and Sympathetic Magic, two plays which were written 22 years apart but appear to have been conceived as companion plays with a great many things in common. As such they make fascinating viewing back to back. However, each is an entirely separate story and they do not need to be seen together.
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"Highlighting some of Wilson’s lesser-known works is a noble pursuit, as his cerebral, entertaining plays force you to walk away with a new perspective, even if that means reckoning with our almost incomprehensible insignificance in the face of history and the cosmos."
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