Sudden Traveler

(Run Time: approx. 3.25 hours)

Featuring her signature themes of identity, eroticism, and existential quest, the stories in Sarah Hall's third collection travel far afield in location and ambition, from Turkish forest and coastline to the rain-drenched villages of Cumbria.

The characters in Sudden Traveler walk, drive, dream, and fly, trying to reconcile themselves with their journeys through life, death, and love. Science fiction meets folktale and philosophy meets mortality.

A woman with a new generation of pacemaker chooses to shut it down in the Lakeland, the site of her strongest memories. A man repatriated in the near east hears the name of an old love called and must unpack history's dark suitcase. From the new world-waves of female anger and resistance, a mythical creature evolves. And in the woods on the border between warring countries, an old well facilitates a dictator's downfall, before he gains power.

A master of short fiction, Sarah Hall opens channels in the human mind and spirit and takes us to the very edge of our possible selves.

Sarah Hall (Author) is hailed as a "writer of show-stopping genius" and a two-time Man Booker Prize nominee. She is the award-winning author of seven novels and three short-story collections. Notably, she is the only author to win the prestigious BBC National Short Story Award twice — first in 2013 with Mrs Fox and again in 2020 with The Grotesques.

Mary Jane Wells (Narrator) trained as an actor at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, doing theatre in the UK and Europe for 12 years prior to her long-term love affair with the US. She is an award-winning actor and writer who has performed at The Mark Taper Forum with an adaptation of French classic, The Red Balloon, returning later with a solo show, Martha, which toured to the Annenberg Centre, the Kennedy Center, the New Victory on Broadway, and at an international showcase in Philadelphia. She has toured extensively with the Smithsonian and Honolulu Theatre.

Her next new solo show, The Good Girl, is a recent recipient of sponsorship. She partners with Author’s Republic, Capital Theatres and The Kennedy Center from the very beginning — for what she hopes will be an irreverently hilarious new show for those who care for and live with Dementia.

It is her wildest dream to serve with storytelling and create appropriate social impact where possible. maryjanewells.org