Green Room Productions Brings Sex with Strangers to Montpelier

The Montpelier Stage Confronts the Digital Age

When a reserved literary professor in her late 30s crosses paths with a brash internet celebrity nearly a decade her junior during a Michigan snowstorm, the resulting collision of distinct worlds exposes the shifting boundaries of modern privacy. That fictional encounter anchors Laura Eason’s play Sex with Strangers, which opens a run from November 11–15 at the Montpelier Performing Arts Hub.

For Green Room Productions artistic director Joanne Greenberg, who directs the central Vermont professional company's mounting of the play, the production arrives at a moment when social attitudes toward ambition and intimacy have undergone a profound transformation. Starring Kianna Bromley and Louis Bronson, the staging brings a script written at least 15 years ago into sharp dialogue with contemporary anxieties about digital exposure.

From Chicago Premieres to a Vermont Black Box

Written by Laura Eason, Sex with Strangers made its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago in 2011. Directed by David Schwimmer, the production featured Sally Murphy and Stephen Louis Grush. The play premiered off-Broadway at Second Stage Theatre in 2014. Directed by Schwimmer, the off-Broadway production featured Anna Gunn and Billy Magnussen.

As Greenberg noted, the play’s passage of time mirrors a widening chasm in generational attitudes toward public visibility. While the older protagonist guards her privacy as a reclusive author chasing literary validation, her younger counterpart uses millions of readers to claim New York Times Best Seller List cachet with effortless media savvy.

“We’re all exposing parts of our formerly private selves online in ways that can be both helpful to others but also could be harmful to ourselves,” Greenberg said. “And so it’s worth continuing to look at what social media and online presence are doing for and against us — and also recognizing that people with potentially clashing points of view can find points of connection.”

Staging Intimacy in an Emerging Space

The production marks an ambitious theatrical use of the Montpelier Performing Arts Hub, located at 35 College St. Housed in the former Vermont College of the Arts Gary Library, the venue features a 97-seat black box theater/200-person concert hall, a café and lounge — with a First-Class Liquor and Catering License — a green room, ADA-compliant bathrooms, and other ancillary rooms. Bromley is the founder and director of the Performing Arts Hub.

Adapting the two-location structure of Eason’s play—which moves from an Airbnb in the country in the first act to an apartment in Chicago in the second—presents distinct logistical hurdles within the intimate confines of the black box. Yet Greenberg emphasizes that the venue’s tight physical configuration serves the material, thrusting audiences directly into the psychological wrestling match between the two characters.

By blending transition music with the tensions of mutual attraction and professional envy, the Vermont production tests whether a script conceived in the early days of the social media era can still speak to an audience facing an entirely different digital reality.