Phillip Howze’s play Frontieres Sans Frontieres is about three orphans navigating the abstract yet familiar world called, “here”—a place shaped by the imperial systems of education, healthcare, media, and even theater itself. Through the lens of absurdism and dark comedy, Frontieres Sans Frontieres asks the audience to confront how these systems shape our values, our relationships, and even our bodies. This play reflects on how soft power has built the worlds that we assume have been around forever, but what happens when we begin to pull the loose ends of these fragile structures of reality? Ok, now take all of that but make it funny!!!

There’s resistance in how we remember things, there’s imagination, there’s a spark of something ancient and wise—embodied knowledge, art, presence—that reminds us we weren’t always THIS way. Humans are not wired THIS way, and therefore there is also resistance in how we forget things.

The questions at the heart of this play are both simple and profound:
What becomes possible when we unlearn? And another strikingly timely question posed by Toni Cade Bambara, “What are you pretending not to Know?”