Social Security premiered at The Bushwick Starr in February 2015, featuring Elizabeth Dement, Cynthia Hopkins and T. Ryder Smith.

June, a retired pretzel factory worker, finds herself deaf after forty years with machines, widowed, and stranded in the urban muck of Reading, PA. She forges ahead gamely, aided by her robust will to find the good in life, and attended, for better or worse, by a few neighbors. Her landlord, once a community pillar, insinuates himself into what remains of her affairs with Machiavellian panache, while a younger neighbor from down the block selflessly chaperones her trips to the grocery store. But June, generous in her affections and unworldly-wise, seesaws between these two unlikely alliances, and her yearning for ordinary human companionship only drives her further into danger. She forges ahead gamely, but her yearning for ordinary human companionship only drives her further into danger.

Director: Paul Lazar

Producers: Jennifer Conley Darling and Eva C. Scanlan

Co-presented by terraNOVA Collective

2015 Honorable Mention The Kilroys

SELECTED PRESS

"Ms. Masciotti mines the banalities of everyday chatter for heroic poetry...there's a determined empathy in her work that enlivens the senses." - The New York Times

"(5 out of 5 stars) [Masciotti] deserves a prize for putting a retired pretzel-machine worker center stage, for figuring a way to write an entire play about how money changes hands in America that seems truthful and wry." Time Out New York

"Among the great many female characters in modern drama -- Molly Bloom from Ulysses, Lil Bit from How I Learned to Drive, Marge Gundersen from Fargo -- June...of Christina Masciotti's Social Security stands proudly among them...a truly modern heroine of our time." New York Theatre Review

"Christina Masciotti's wormwood-bitter comedy about a crotchety old lady falling prey to her landlord needed precise execution, which it got from director Paul Lazar and crackerjack cast Cynthia Hopkins, T. Ryder Smith, and the astonishing Elizabeth Dement. Truthful about how money and society work and funny as fuck, Masciotti is major - she is our heir to Moliere." - Helen Shaw's Best Shows of 2015, Divers Alarums
 

PRODUCTION HISTORY

The Bushwick Starr, February 2015

The Bushwick Starr (developmental reading), January 2014

Social Security is made possible with support from a Jerome Foundation 50th Anniversary Grant, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, and the generous contributions of many individual patrons. 

Photography by Maria Baranova