Other Bodies

Other Bodies is a new solo play, set to open Off-Broadway as a limited run at The Barrow Group. It is a world premiere written by Martin Moran and produced by the company in its own theater. It is an original piece, not a musical, a revival or an adaptation of another work. As of October 2026, Moran is the only performer listed, so the evening is one writer-actor on a small stage.

The play completes a three-part cycle of autobiographical solo pieces. The Tricky Part came first and All the Rage second, and both looked back at Moran's boyhood and what followed. This one turns outward. It asks how people can find their way back to one another when borders are closing and walls are going up, and it was written out of the pandemic years. Its subject is life alongside difference and the recognition of experiences unlike our own.

The Barrow Group is a nonprofit founded in 1986, with more than 150 shows developed or produced since then.

Public descriptions of the play speak about its subject rather than its plot, so what happens on stage is not yet known. The earlier plays show the form: Moran tells his own story alone, in the first person, and the official page describes his approach as a signature mix of vulnerability and humor.

The Tricky Part concerns a Catholic boys' camp where a counselor abused Moran from age 12 until he was 15. All the Rage asks why he does not feel more anger about the crime done to him as a boy. The search takes him from the Rockies to South Africa and includes translating an asylum seeker's account of torture. Each play became a memoir from Beacon Press, in 2005 and 2016.

The Barrow Group stages this kind of solo work in its own 70-seat theater, a flexible black box with an LED lighting grid, a lighting booth, backstage space and dressing rooms. It sits inside a performing arts center that fills a whole floor of the building and also holds eight studios. With one performer in a room this size, the audience sits close to the stage.

The run is the world premiere, and its first performance is the first preview at The Barrow Group Performing Arts Center on November 19, 2026. Opening night is November 23, 2026.

Barrish directed Moran's earlier solo plays too. The Tricky Part had its Off-Broadway world premiere at the McGinn-Cazale Theater in April 2004, and The Barrow Group remounted it in November and December 2018. All the Rage followed in 2013 at a different Off-Broadway house, the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre.

Other Bodies has no awards yet. Its predecessors were recognized. The Tricky Part earned an Obie Award in 2004, along with Drama Desk nominations for the play and for its solo performance. In 2013 All the Rage won a Lucille Lortel Award in the solo show category.