An aged master storyteller, Mother spins a hilarious and unbelievable yarn of her life story, from cow pastures to pirate ships to canine space travel, while her two adult sons listen with rapturous attention or exasperation. Jason Craig’s latest play, developed with actor Jessica Jelliffe and their celebrated theatre company Banana Bag & Bodice, asks what the value of a good story is, regardless of its relationship to the truth.

The Prototype Festival, which takes place every January in New York City, focuses on contemporary chamber opera and music. The works in Prototype 2016 paint a vision for contemporary opera that is politically motivated and story-centric. How do these qualities interact with opera’s unique relationship to time and its ability to stop, elongate, or rapidly flip our sense of temporality?

International WOW Company's Surrender combines elements of avantgarde performance, dramatic karaoke, and audience participation to create an immersive portrait of urban combat and communicate the challenges soldiers face reintegrating into civilian life. Director Josh Fox reflects on making theatre out of the experience of being a soldier in 21st-century Iraq.

Heiner Goebbels's music theatre work Stifters Dinge is a performance without human performers, a “no-man show” in which things are the thing. In its exhibition of mobile scenic elements and automated musical instruments, it is a meditation on objecthood, materality, and the environment that nevertheless reveals a humanity at its center.