Wet or,

Isabella

The Pirate Queen

Enters

the Horse Latitudes

Synopsis

(4M/3W)

Four survivors of a storm-sunken pirate ship—the legendary Isabella, Neptune’s bastard daughter; pirates Jenny (a runaway whore) and Sally (an electrified girl); and the Viscountess Marlene, a drag queen—seize a half-wrecked ship manned only by Captain Joppa and two sailors, Jack the cabin boy and ex-slave Horatio. Joppa is determined to get back to the war. Isabella has other plans. Amidst time lurches, shifting loyalties, story-telling and sudden violence, hearts lost and secrets revealed, the seven souls find themselves without wind or current on a slowly sinking ship—until an unexpected event offers either hope or doom.

Premiered by Moxie Theatre, San Diego, 2006. Workshopped at Summer Play Festival, NYC, Portland Stage Company’s Little Festival of the Unexpected, and Cutting Ball Theater’s Risk Is This festival. University productions at Hamilton and Palomar.

Wet is published by TRW Plays; click here to order a copy to read, or to request production rights.

The 2004 SPF workshop of Wet or, Isabella the Pirate Queen Enters the Horse Latitudes, directed by Kent Nicholson. Set Susan Zeeman Rogers; lights Nicole Pearce; costumes Jessica Gaffney. Cast: Angel Desai, Coleman Domingo, Sarah Lord, Sean Owens, Maureen Porter, Lee Aaron Rosen, Richard Ziman.

In the Press...

“Adams’ writing is lyrical and circuitous, with an almost Shakespearean weight to it. …[Wet] showcases her sly, literary sense of humor.” –Curtainup.com. Click here for full review.

“The play is by turns a funny, poignant, angry, searching, yearning glimpse of a ship of disparate souls in search of their destination and destinies, and full of the healthy sexual ambiguities that are a hallmark of Moxie Theatre productions.” –George Weinberg-Harter, SanDiego.com. Click here for full review.

“The opening sends a clear signal of what sort of show we can expect: one which will play with both high-culture and mass-culture symbolism, upsetting the audience’s expectations of gender and sexuality…. One of Adams’ strengths as a playwright is being able to write characters who are intensely theatrical, so obviously constructed to the needs of her dramatic design that you can’t imagine anyone like them existing in real life — while still involving us in their lives and emotions and getting us to care about them as if they were real people.” –Mark Gabrish Conlan, Zenger’s Newsmagazine. Click here for full review.

"“Wet” is a true delight..." –Charlene Baldridge, SDnews.com.  Click here for full review.