Scott Organ

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Diversion

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Diversion

Playwright Scott Organ excels at creating characters whose mistakes in their jobs and relationships lead to agonizing consequences. His 2020 drama, 17 Minutes, was a harrowing tale of a sheriff’s deputy in a crumbling marriage who failed to stop a mass shooting. For his new work, Diversion, Organ reunites with director Seth Barrish and the Barrow Group to focus on a close-knit nursing unit on the verge of unraveling. This quiet and absorbing think piece examines the hardship of opioid addiction and the post-traumatic stress of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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17 Minutes

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17 Minutes

In the aftermath of the 2018 high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., there came the revelation that Scot Peterson, a sheriff’s deputy stationed outside the school at the time of the attack, failed to engage the shooter, staying hidden at the base of a stairwell for some 48 minutes. Though Peterson is never mentioned, he is clearly the inspiration for Scott Organ’s poignant and piercing tick-tock drama, 17 Minutes. Tracking the steady demise of a good man who makes a bad mistake, the work chronicles a life that not so much shatters as it does dismantle, like a service revolver being disassembled one piece at a time.

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The Thing With Feathers

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The Thing With Feathers

Scott Organ’s opening scene for The Thing With Feathers is deceptively creepy for anyone attuned to the dangers of the Internet. A young girl, Anna (Alexa Shae Niziak), is sitting on her bed, with paperwork around her, and she’s talking to a man named Eric—someone she has never met. They have clearly bonded online over poetry, particularly Emily Dickinson. They recite stanzas of Dickinson’s “Life” to each other: “For each ecstatic instant/We must an anguish pay/In keen and quivering ratio/To the ecstasy.” The voice gently probes elements of her home life and her relationship with her mother. The scene promises a literate, solidly structured drama, and it delivers.

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