PYRO: HOW TO BLOW UP A LIFE Set For Next Month at Chance Theater
The reading will occur on Wednesday, April 2, 2025, at 7:30 PM on the Cripe Stage at the Bette Aitken theater arts Center.
By: Stephi Wild Mar. 04, 2025
Chance Theater has announced the staged reading of the brand new play Pyro: How to Blow Up a Life, written by 2018 Chance Fox Fellow Khanisha Foster and directed by Sasha Nicolle Smith. This event is part of Chance Theater's acclaimed "On the Radar" (OTR) New Play Reading Series, highlighting innovative and impactful works in progress. The reading will occur on Wednesday, April 2, 2025, at 7:30 PM on the Cripe Stage at the Bette Aitken theater arts Center.
Pyro: How to Blow Up a Life is a play about a woman who finds out on her 40th birthday that her husband of 20 years has been cheating on her, so she decides to become a sexual anthropologist and embark on an experiment to sleep with everyone to find out who she really is.
Helen, our protagonist, gave up her whole life to move to the desert and help her husband run his family's fading fireworks business only to find out she is actually the laughing stock of the town. Her husband has been cheating -- for years -- and everyone knows it. Now alone and confused about who she would have been without him, Helen takes to lighting up her own sky and makes a sexy romp of an experiment to discover who she left behind. In this funny, sexy, heartbreaking romp Helen becomes electric in a place where friction is the biggest danger and leads us to the biggest mystery of all -- who burned the whole factory to the ground?
When asked what she was most looking forward to, Foster shared her excitement about returning to Chance Theater, where she previously served as a Fox Fellow, directed Yellowman, and led a series of clown workshops with the theater's ensemble and audience. “This place is where I discovered I would make theatre without centering panic,” she said. “And when they offered me this commission, I knew exactly what to write—a personal, visceral, and physical exploration of a newfound sexual freedom at forty.” Yellowman earned seven OCTG Award nominations and received widespread critical acclaim, but Foster emphasizes that her new work takes bold artistic risks. “This play is ambitious and combines multiple forms of theater, and we need you in the audience to help us discover what it can be.”
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