How The Silent Treatment Inspired Anne Washburn's New Play, ANTLIA PNEUMATICA

"You take a bunch of mostly New York playwrights and you drop them into Texas, which many of them were sort of apprehensive about. But the first thing is barbecue, and they're kind of, like, Ooh, because barbecue makes people feel safe."

That's how playwright Anne Washburn, whose ANTLIA PNEUMATICA opens tonight at Playwrights Horizons, describes her initiation into the Texas Hill Country ten-day silent playwriting retreat at a refabricated ranch, where the play's first draft was scripted.

The ranch's owners, described by Washburn to The New Yorker as, "big Beckett fans," insisted that the writers stop for dinner, on their drive down, at a roadside joint called Rudy's.

But the mealtime atmosphere was quite different once the serious job of playwriting began. The retreat's leader, playwright Erik Ehn, demanded "a fairly sturdy form of silence" at all times.

"It's not just that you don't speak. You don't write notes, you don't gesture at each other, you don't particularly make eye contact. You don't, like, sigh expressively."

As a result, the playwright describes her new one as being full of sound, like the clinking of ice cubes, the sloshing of lemonade, a ringing phone and the whoosh of wind that causes pecans to patter onto the stage floor.

"Yeah, the Pecan Drop," Washburn said, wearily. "At first, every performance the Pecan Drop would be a mysterious thing-how many would go? How many wouldn't go?"

Best known for her previous Playwrights Horizons offering, MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY (about apocalypse survivors passing on human culture through an episode of "The Simpsons"), Washburn had no idea what she would be writing about when she left for the retreat. The resulting play is about a group of old friends, their ties stretched thin by time and space, who reunite at a Texas ranch for the funeral of one of the gang.

"Funeral spells food," says Washburn, and a lot of comfort food made its way into the script.

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The Playwrights Horizons commission / world premiere production of ANTLIA PNEUMATICA, a new play by Anne Washburn, directed by two-time Obie Award winner Ken Rus Schmoll, opens tonight, April 4 at 7PM at Playwrights Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Theater (416 West 42nd Street). The limited engagement plays through Sunday, April 24.

The cast features Obie Award winner Rob Campbell, Nat DeWolf, Crystal Finn, Obie Award winner April Matthis,Annie Parisse and Maria Striar.

The production features scenic design by Rachel Hauck, costume design by Jessica Pabst, lighting design by two-time Obie Award winner Tyler Micoleau, sound design by Leah Gelpe and original music by Daniel Kluger.

In a ranch house deep in Texas Hill Country, a once tight-knit group of friends reunites to bury one of their own. But as they look backward through their lives, it becomes clear they've lost more than just their old pal. In this haunting new play from Anne Washburn, the boundaries between then and now grow disarmingly blurry as these estranged friends confront their slippery past.