Artistic Vision

SPOKE emerges from a central question: what is the cost of silence? At its core, the play interrogates how silence functions within families — not merely as avoidance, but as a form of complicity. When the preservation of a family’s image outweighs the safety of its members, harm is not only perpetuated but normalized. In SPOKE, the familiar rhythms of family life — celebration, gossip, ritual — become vehicles for denial, displacement, and buried accountability. The result is a structure that protects itself at the expense of those most vulnerable.

Told in reverse chronology, the play mirrors the emotional mechanics of hindsight: the audience witnesses events with the knowledge that something terrible has already happened. This structure exposes how signs of danger are often visible in retrospect, often hidden in plain sight, and yet routinely ignored in real time.

Through dark humor, emotional volatility, and broken family storytelling, SPOKE engages with one of the last remaining cultural taboos: generational sexual abuse and the protective systems that obscure it. In a moment when many truths are finally being spoken aloud, SPOKE confronts one that still remains largely unsaid.