MadLab Presents THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT Next Month

Meet the people on the other side of the late night fast food window in this dark comedy opening September 8th at MadLab.

A dark delightful comedy following three employees of a fictional twenty-four hour fast food restaurant in the (very real) suburb of Murrieta, CA, during the graveyard shift. Get a look at the lives of the people on the other side of your favorite fast-food window. Come join us for laughs and a side of fries.

Director: Corey Ragan
Stage Manager: Mary Elizabeth Harris
Assistant Stage Manager/Understudy Dev and Robber: Colleen Kochensparger
Set Designer: Kate Hawthorne
Lighting Designer: Ara Beal
Sound Designer: Corey Ragan
Graphic Design: Will Macke

Cast
Marley: Laura Falb
Dev: Ben Wayne
Casey: Dana Bauman
Robber/Understudy Marley and Casey:
Colleen Underwood
Carl: Jim Azelvandre

Showtimes: 8 pm. Sept 8-10, 16-17, 23-24

Tickets are $18, $15 for Students/seniors, $13 for members.

The play was written as part of the PlayLab writers group at Skylight Theatre Company in Los Angeles, CA and received a staged workshop in 2015 at the Skylight in its LABWorks Festival. It was a finalist for the Reva Shiner Comedy Award through Bloomington Playwrights Project.

The Graveyard Shift is a dark comedy following three employees of a fictional twenty-four hour fast food restaurant in the (very real) suburb of Murrieta, CA, during the graveyard shift. Marley, the new employee, is scrambling to find sanity and meaning in a job she otherwise finds demeaning and humiliating. Dev, the top slacker of all slacker employees, just wants to take a nap. And Casey, the assistant manager, is trying (and going a little too far) to inspire her hapless underlings. During their graveyard shift, Marley, Dev, and Casey are pulled into a prank war with the employees of a nearby McDonalds while a thief is hitting up the local establishments.

The play uses physical gags, heightened situations and reality, and compressed time to explore the economic reality of people who work service jobs and how they are treated by the outside world, as well as the lost, stuck, and disappointed feelings of a generation whose American Dream looks nothing like that of their parents' world.

Chelsea Sutton is an LA-based writer and director. She was a 2016 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and an alumni of the 2022 Clarion UCSD Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop. Chelsea was a 2018 Sewanee Writers Conference Playwright Fellow and a Humanitas PlayLA award winner, and her plays have been finalists for the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Woodward/Newman Drama Award, Reva Shiner Comedy Award, and others. She collaborated with Matt Hill and Lisa Sanaye Dring to write Welcome to the Blumhouse Live, an interactive film event for Blumhouse/Amazon Prime by Little Cinema, which was nominated for a 2021 Emmy for Outstanding Interactive Program. She is the Associate Artistic Director at Rogue Artists Ensemble where she co-founded and co-directs the Rogue Lab New Play Incubator. She holds an MFA from UC Riverside.

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