New York City, Wednesday July 13, 1977.

It’s been a long, hot summer. Son of Sam is on the prowl. The city’s finances are stretched to breaking point. Garbage is piled high on the streets, and tension is simmering, about to boil over. At 9:36 pm, an overload caused by an electrical storm disables the city’s power grid. The five boroughs are plunged into total darkness. The blackout will last for 25 hours.

This is the story of the first night, as experienced by two distinct sets of characters, in two very different locations. One, a swanky piano bar in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper. The other, a mom and pop electrical store in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighbourhood. In Rudy’s bar, a white middle-aged couple, affluent and disillusioned, mark their wedding anniversary. A pair of brash bankers take advantage of the suspension of everyday reality to indulge their master-of-the-universe fantasies. A young busboy struggles to maintain his dignity in the face of aggression given licence by the strangeness of the times.
In Deltronics, an African-American couple strive to keep the looters and arsonists at bay, protecting the modest life they’ve built from the opportunism of a community descended, under cover of darkness, into feral lawlessness.

When a mysterious portal opens up between Rudy’s and Deltronics, two characters find themselves transplanted; an entitled banker landing in the middle of a warzone partly of his making and a young boy catapulted into a world of unexamined privilege. The banker must justify his life choices to earn his freedom, while the boy is made unwitting pawn in a dispute between a husband and wife set at odds by their disappointments. At dawn, they will return to their previous lives, having witnessed their city – its insecurities and opportunities, quirks and inequalities – from the opposite sides of a divide both real and imagined.

Blackout explores privilege and social inequity, family and community, the compromises of ageing and the misdirected fury of youth, and is a funny, savage, intimate portrayal of a moment in history when the lights of civilisation flickered, and almost went out.

‘Ripples’ explores Alzheimer’s from a unique perspective, as four versions of the same woman, at various ages, gather to say goodbye to her and to relive key moments from her life, with joyful and traumatic. As one by one each version fades out of memory, the question is reframed: what is a person made of?