Red Herring continues its mission of bringing less-performed (in Columbus) classics to our stages with a crackling, brutal production of David Harrower’s debut Knives in Hens, directed by Penny Napoli.

This tight, hundred-minute (no intermission) play centers on a rural village in a pre-industrial but post-printing press time. An unnamed young woman (Jordan Davis), married to the village plowman Pony William (Sean Taylor), finds herself drawn to the miller, Gilbert Horn (Scott Willis). 

Davis’ young woman’s innate curiosity and wit runs her up against a society (even in her own marital bed) that would rather she stay where she is. That lust for knowing – wanting to name everything and find its true definition, its true heart – draws up groundswells of strength but also destruction, a painful casting-off of heavy, dead skin. 

Red Herring Productions teams with PAST Productions for a moving, righteous production of S. M. Shepard-Massat’s Waiting to be Invited, directed by Patricia Wallace-Winbush.

Waiting to Be Invited follows three friends and co-workers, Ms. Odessa (Julie Whitney-Scott), Ms. Delores (Patricia Wallace-Winbush), and Ms. Louise (Demia Kandi), in Atlanta in the early 60s, leaving work to take part in a lunch counter sit-in. Shepard-Massat’s play — among many other strengths — knows that most of life comprises the moments leading up to the moment everyone talks about.

​Red Herring continues their ambitious season with the world premiere of Creighton James’ dark comedy Dirt in a visceral, frenetic mounting directed by Amanda Phillips.

Dirt recasts Sam Shepard’s working-class surrealism as a cartoonish farce. Jimmy (Benjamin Turner) returns to his hometown in the heart of coal country Pennsylvania for the first time in seven years. He and his brother Rusty (Samuel Patridge), who stayed and still works in the mine, are on a mission to exhume the remains of their father before the bulldozers of eminent domain churn up all that ground.