Tea Party at the End of the World

Overview

As a guest of this intimate tea party, you will be served tea of exceptional quality, play entirely civilized parlor games, and when the end comes, no need to panic, you won’t be alone.

You and your fellow guests are attendees at a tea party at the end of the world, partaking in the rituals and obligations of being a guest in someone else’s, for lack of a better word, home. Your host for this tea party is new to the gig, but what she lacks in grace, she makes up for in burning human intensity and unexpected abilities. 

TEA PARTY AT THE END OF THE WORLD is inspired by the creator’s time in the Arctic Circle as an artist-in-residence and her low-key obsession with the ritual comforts and complexity of loose-leaf tea. TEA PARTY… explores how we connect to one another in times of uncertainty and fear; celebrating the splendor of being alive in a beautiful and disappearing world, while honoring the unfathomable cost it exacts on our ability to connect and find purpose.

This darkly humorous, cutting and cozy exploration of the apocalypse wonders alongside the audience if remaining playful in dire circumstances is the key not only to surviving, but thriving.

 * Tea service is included in the ticket price.

** Audience members will be served a selection of top-shelf, loose-leaf teas throughout the piece. If you are sensitive to caffeine and want to partake of the tea, please consider attending an afternoon show.

About the Artist

IKantKoan Play/s creates games and immersive experiences in which the things we take most seriously in life are the things we can be most playful about.

Work includes theater, tabletop games, mobile games, street games, role-playing games, and epic games focused on personal and communal transformation through play. We take big, juicy, complex subject matter like falling in love, chaos theory, ethical philosophy, and thinking about the future and make it playful and communal.

Our work has been presented at La Jolla Playhouse's 2023 Without Walls festival, Ars Nova, HERE Arts, SXSW, Tanween Creativity Festival, and Caveat NYC. The studio's immersive theater productions CHAOS THEORY and KNOW THYSELF have run a combined 18 months in NYC and our seven Age of Enlightenment tabletop games have been featured and garnered awards, including best tabletop game, at Fastaval (Copenhagen), Hawaiicon (Honolulu), and BostonFIG.

The studio's founder, Jessica Creane, is a 2022 Arctic Circle Artist-in-Residence, an environmentally-focused game designer with The National Parks Service, and a founding member of The Rachael Carson Center Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators. Jessica is a published author of critical game theory with the journal Game Environments, as well as a co-author of the upcoming 2023 book release of 'An Existential Toolkit for Climate Educators'. She is a Professor of Game Design at Drexel University.

Jessica has been a keynote and/or featured speaker at TEDx (‘Gamifying Chaos: Embracing Uncertainty Through Play’), Beyond Opera (Helsinki), The World Economic Forum DQ Symposium on Xr+ (NYC), and Games for Change (NYC), and been featured by NYTimes, Imaginary Worlds, and on KQED San Fransisco, among others.

Credits