Feature Fantasy Drama
An imaginative young playwright comes of age in the shadow of her mother’s terminally ill heart, which takes the form of a charismatic woman with superhuman powers.
“A triumphantly sincere piece of theatre… Weaver is putting her heart in your hands, and that’s the greatest gift any playwright can bestow.”
Nat Cassidy, NYTheatre.com
With my mom at the hospital in 2009, in her final days of waiting for a heart transplant that never came.
The Story
The Shapeshifter In Your Chest is a coming-of-age drama with a magic realist twist, about a playwright struggling to separate truth from fiction. Think Tick…Tick…BOOM! meets Big Fish, with a narrative structure inspired by Greta Gerwig’s Little Women.
Shapeshifter tells the story of Maggie, a young aspiring writer whose mother Lark suffers from a terminally damaged heart. The heart manifests as a wisecracking woman named Kory, who can swell to the size of a car, flood a house with water, and call down lightning from the sky.
Kory is a trickster, unpredictable and terrifying, yet beloved by everyone she meets. When Maggie moves to New York for a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity, Kory insists on coming along, igniting a fantastical crisis as Maggie tries to launch her new life while still being responsible for her mother’s malfunctioning heart.
Shapeshifter is an adaptation of my critically acclaimed play Cause of Failure, which premiered at the 2012 NYC Fringe Festival, directed by Leta Tremblay. Scroll down for photos.
"Buoyant, truthful and devastating... At once completely universal, and so personal you feel like you should look away."
-Anna Van Valin, New York Theatre Review
