About the Play:

The Insurgents is a full-length drama by Lucy Thurber. Explores the intersections of class, race, and home through the eyes of a female, 20-something former athlete, who has travelled across the country searching for something to believe in, only to find herself home again. The Insurgents examines the lies and injustice that history has handed down to us and the actions people take when they finally decide that enough is enough.

The Insurgents is inspired by the lives of of four American-grown revolutionaries: the armed insurrectionist and abolitionist John Brown, slave rebellion leader Nat Turner, Underground Railroad conductor and Civil War spy Harriet Tubman, and the decorated Iraq war hero and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. All deeply religious. All heard voices from God. All were extremely patriotic and loved their country. And all believed in violence. Their stories and unique historical markers meld into a contemporary family's quest for identity and survival. Sally Wright, an American wanderer, returns to her dead-end rural northeast town after an injury ended her college athletic scholarship. At home, she's forced to face her beer guzzling father, wayward brother and the dearth of hope in her impoverished town. She starts carrying her shotgun wherever she goes and buries herself in books about some of the most dynamic and controversial figures in American history. Yet even as she immerses herself in the lives of American "insurgents" and clutches her shotgun to her chest, the bleak oppression of a life without opportunity threatens to poison her spirit.

The Insurgents premiered in 2011 at Shepherd University during the Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. It was produced at Off-Broadway's LAByrinth Theater Company in 2015.

Cast: 2 female, 3 male

What people say:

"[A] small but mightily ambitious state-of-the-nation play… The Insurgents is about a rage that never stops simmering in the home of the free, brave and disenfranchised. And it is achingly, earnestly aware that, as Sally puts it, there's a fine line in this country between heroism and terrorism…And Ms. Thurber draws convincing and disturbing parallels among disparate people—black and white, past and present – who all feel they've been cheated and marginalized." — The New York Times

"No playwright has a better handle on the decay of small-town America and the anxiety of the rural working class [than Lucy Thurber]…[In The Insurgents] Thurber is telling the story of poor Americans of all tribes at each other's throats while the exploitative status quo persists. Yet when someone tries to destroy that system, we call them terrorists…[This] story is a vital one that's not told enough in the halls of our nation's cultural institutions." — TheaterMania.com

About the Playwright:

Lucy Thurber is an award winning American playwright based in New York City. She is the recipient of Manhattan Theatre Club Playwriting Fellowship, the first Gary Bonasorte Memorial Prize for Playwriting, a proud recipient of a Lilly Award, an OBIE Award for The Hill Town Plays cycle, and The Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwriting Award. She has taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Sarah Lawrence College.