Time Exiles
Recovery touches every life, yet we rarely speak openly about how to live in it. This moving series of plays explores the truth that there is no quick cure for trauma, only the courageous act of turning toward it with compassion and presence and humor. In honoring loss, we rediscover the profound resilience and gratitude that live alongside it.
Time Exiles brings together stories from individuals in recovery (from trauma, grief, injury, addiction, eating disorders, and more) in a series of original plays that engage audiences and artists in an experiential performance of recovery and healing.
Trauma can dislodge us from time, and we seldom get the time and space to simply be with our grief, to tend to difficult, life-changing experiences with the presence and care they call for. With that intention, Time Exiles is a chance to step out of the day-to-day, into the communal environment of the theatre, a liminal space that can defy the temporal.
This immersive and experiential offering consists of three original plays and five additional salons where audiences participate in dialogues and interactions around the topic of recovery, all free and open to the public.
The PLays
TIME EXILES
by LIZ APPEL
Through short episodic scenes, we discover that five strangers, each struggling with different personal burdens (chronic pain, grief, addiction, heartbreak), have been ejected from time itself. They're stranded with only each other and a new community-building process to guide them out. Through a series of collaborative exercises that range from hilarious to harrowing, they must find their way, as individuals and as a newly formed collective, back into the flow of shared time and humanity.
ARTISTS ANONYMOUS
By NADIRA SIMONE
It is said: ‘once an addict always an addict’. What if the same were true for Artists? In this irreverent comedy, five struggling “creatives” are guided by an artistic guru on The Path to unblock their creativity. Be it love lost, a car accident, or the self-doubt they allowed to set in, everyone in this room has a moment where everything . Through “trust calls” and role play, they fight to return to their craft, until they realize that things are not quite what they seem…
Salons
TRIPS
By MADELEINE BARKER
An exploration of the complexities of addiction and second chances. The play follows two women, a doctor and a patient, as they start the recovery process for opioid addiction. Instead of a typical rehab center, we are set in an Ibogaine Clinic. Ibogaine is a powerful hallucinogen that disarms the opioid receptors in our brains and cancels out withdrawal symptoms, however, it is illegal in the US. The play exists on several planes, in our present reality, in the past, and in a dream.
Salon offerings will include conversations with the artists behind the works about their processes, a therapeutic hypnosis session with a trained hypnotherapist, a panel with leaders of AA, NA, Al-Anon, and Vets4Warriors, multiple Story Circle events, a session for caregivers and allies of people in recovery, a grief counseling music therapy session, and much more. Exact events, partners, and dates will be available closer to the production. If you have a salon you would like to pitch, feel free to reach out to info@notchtheatre.org.
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Jayne Mclendon
Co-Creator & Producer
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Liz Appel
Co-Creator & Playwright
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Nadira Simone
Playwright
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Liz Appel piloted this program with Notch Theatre Company as a digital, community-engaged process with 10 artists in 2021. It was then workshopped at Notch's annual retreat in 2022 and presented as part of New Georges' JAMboree at the Center for Performance Research in 2024. Meanwhile, Jayne McLendon was working with Notch on a similar project that presented at HB Studios in 2023. The projects were merged in June 2025 when, through a devised workshop at the Vineyard Theatre, it became Time Exiles.
Time Exiles: A Recovery Salon is slated for 2027.
Cast and Creative Team from 2025 workshop at Vineyard Theatre
TIME EXILES is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
