FENGARI Ensemble is pleased to announce it’s inaugural full-length production, and the New York premiere of Steve Bellwood’s COCKPIT.

When Tom, a poet and high school English teacher, and Diane, a feminist social sciences professor have their car break down in the suburbs of the Pacific Northwest they are aided and welcomed in for the night by Ivan, an elite mercenary in the war on terror and by his teenaged wife Ruth, a former stripper turned housewife. Fueled by a liberating sense of dislocation, whiskey, curiosity and lust, both couples strive to come to a new understanding of themselves under the influence of deeply different strangers. As tensions and attractions build the night moves towards epiphany, transgression and violence. COCKPIT emerges as a deeply urgent and timely drama that lays bare the cost of the war on terror in relation to the American domestic front. The play explores the gap and the bridging of the gap between soldiers and civilians, men and women, those who work with their bodies and those who work with their intellects. It examines the nature of addiction and desire, the fragility of identity, the complicity in violence Americans share, and the ability of lives to change rapidly over the course of one night.

A darkly comic, exhilarating and intoxicating comic tragedy is swiftly entertaining while provoking some of the most important questions that New Yorkers and Americans can ask themselves in 2016.