What is left today of that promise of a better future? The theatrical double feature shows two contemporary, conflicting faces of the metropolis.

As the sun goes down over Berlin, the audience will be invited to follow the contrasting fates of the protagonists from different perspectives.

Brett C. Leonard’s “Guinea Pig Solo” shifts the plot of Büchner’s “Woyzeck” to contemporary New York. Puerto Rican José Solo is a veteran of the Iraq war. He sells hotdogs during the day and at night, he serves as a guinea pig for an experiment meant to erase the trauma of the war from his memory. In a quick succession of scenes, Leonard sketches the last days of an outcast who has nothing left to lose.

In Sheila Callaghan’s “Dead City”, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” sounds as a distant echo. The play shows a day in the life of Samantha Blossom, an Upper East Side web designer with a grown daughter and a dead son, barely less estranged from herself than she is from her unfaithful husband. One morning she wanders off aimlessly and begins an odyssey through the city full of coincidental encounters. Her path continues to cross with the mysterious poet, Jewel.

Callaghan shows an extraordinary skill for concise descriptions which get to the heart of a situation and surrealistically expand it at the same time.