no passengers

No Passengers is a ghost story about a man haunted by a relationship he’s never been able to resolve. Alan has been happily married to his second wife Diane, a fellow faculty member at a small liberal arts college, for close to a decade. He’s put his tumultuous first marriage to Maddie behind him – so he thinks – and has settled down into a near-decade of amiable cohabitation.

Then one day Diane randomly sees on her phone that Maddie has unexpectedly died. Despite barely having thought of her for years, Alan descends into an unexpected, paralyzing grief spiral that rends his bond with Diane and sends him on a chaotic journey of sadness, rage, and dissociation. For her part, Diane first tries to move on, but she soon realizes she can’t repeat Alan’s mistake of trying to rebuild without closure. Drawing on her academic research into an obscure Spiritualist from the late 1800s, Diane becomes determined to bring Maddie back to life so she and Alan can reach some place of resolution. The play climaxes with a shocking act of conjuration from which none of them – Maddie included – will emerge unchanged.

No Passengers is a study of mortality, marriage, and middle age. With this hour-long drama, award-winning playwright Mac Rogers digs deep into a story about mid-life reassessment, everything time takes from us, and our ability to keep transforming as long as we’re still alive.