Evan Brooks’ tightly wound world is thrown into disorder when he’s befriended by an American psychiatrist hell-bent on injecting some sort of deeper meaning and purpose into his new British friend’s life. Over the course of several years the friendship grows but, as it tends to do, tragedy eventually strikes and Evan and his wife, Allison, are left with nothing but a stuffed Peter Pan doll, an empty room, and vanishing memories. As time passes and healing is nowhere in sight, novel yet unorthod ox ideas to deal with pain and grief are carefully introduced. Leading to a proposition. Then an acceptance. And by the end of the play, the answer to the question as to how far science should go in order to bypass the invariability of pain and trauma is never fully answered… but it is weighed and judged and the verdict is not good.

The Games People Play, while outrageously and darkly comedic, is consistently unsettling as the characters and, by default, the audience delve into that murky area where science uncomfortably intersects with those grand age-old issues of ethics and morality. This sharply, and often hilariously, written play not only criticizes our biological instincts to manipulate those in our immediate circle of loved ones, it exposes society’s collective desire to numb itself from all grief — even at the expense of having never remembered those loved ones in the first place.