Flat Earth presents the New England premiere of Ann Marie Healy's What Once We Felt, a science-fiction exploration of the schisms in society and technology. One woman’s utopia is another’s dystopia in which a fully digitized caste society of genetically engineered “Keepers” threaten to drive the intrinsically disadvantaged “Tradepacks” to extinction. Echoing this strife, writer Macy O. Blonsky fights to see her novel—the last novel—published while the editing process strips her work of its intended meaning. Healy's futuristic vision of eugenics and the hunger for creative integrity brings to life the age-old struggle over whose stories deserve to be told.
Daniel Lucas, the government’s top censor, is confronted with a manuscript that threatens to expose his darkest secrets. In his quest to uncover the story’s author, he finds that not only do its words reveal the secrets of his past, but that they may also predict the details of his future. As the worlds of fiction and reality clash and combine, a nightmarish reality emerges where any one of us can be cut, recut, and redacted into oblivion, spotlighting the harsh consequences of bureaucratic control over the flow of information.
Overseen by a totalitarian police state, the people of London navigate the stations of the century-old Underground. Here, flower seller Eliza Doolittle meets the privileged Henry Higgins, a linguistic mastermind who makes a bet that, through lessons in speech and phonetics, he can pass her off as a duchess in six months. Contrasting cold Edwardian elitism with the vibrant and multicultural London of today, Flat Earth’s new adaptation throws Pygmalion’s themes of inequality into stark relief — and Liza and Higgins’ struggle between two far apart worlds will bring new meaning to “mind the gap.”