SADIE HURTZ
by Joshua Fardon
Mandy Gladstone is struggling to write a play about her father Clark, an inventor. She relives her adolescent fascination with Clark’s secretive nature, his manic episodes, his trips to California, and how, at the end of his life, he received a series of mysterious and threatening postcards from Sadie Hurtz, a giant doll shackled to a chair in an abandoned amusement park trailer. When Mandy herself receives similarly threatening postcards from Sadie, she decides to investigate. Her pursuit of the truth reveals carefully guarded secrets about her family, about her father, and about the haunted nature of creativity.
- Cast Size: 3M 3W
- Running Time: 90+. minutes
- Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
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About the Playwright
JOSHUA FARDON (he/him/his)’s plays have been produced in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere. One Acts produced at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Toronto Fringe, Pigs Do Fly, Sacred Fools, Saturn and Vine, The Secret Rose, Slap n’ Tickle, Stevedore, and the Yale Cabaret. He is a three-time O’Neill semifinalist. As a composer, Josh scored the movie Adopt a Sailor and wrote scores for Ruth Margraff’s Stadium Devildare, Ken Roht’s The Birds and his own A Cult Musical. He sold a pilot to Miramax Television. He was the voice of Luke Skywalker in the Lucasfilm/Highbridge Audio NPR production of Return of the Jedi. A graduate of Northwestern University and the acting department of the Yale School of Drama; a member of the Writers Guild of America-East, the Dramatists Guild, SAG-AFTRA and AEA, Resident Playwright and co-Artistic Director of Chicago Dramatists, he started the Chicago Branch of Naked Angels’ Tuesdays@9 Chicago and served as its Creative Director for seven years.
A creepy and compelling psychological rollercoaster of a script, Sadie Hurtz is terrific and terrifyingly fun through and through!
Sadie Hurtz is dark, funny, moving, and completely original — the kind of play that grabs you by the heart and brain at the same time.
At the heart of the story is Mandy Gladstone, a playwright trying to make sense of her enigmatic father Clark, an inventor with a brilliant mind and a complicated past. As Mandy tries to write a play about him, the lines between past and present, truth and invention, begin to blur. What unfolds is part mystery, part memory play, part psychological journey — and all of it deeply human.
There’s also this strange, unforgettable character named Sadie Hurtz — a giant doll shackled to a chair in an abandoned amusement park trailer — who sends threatening postcards that may or may not be real. It sounds surreal (and it is), but it works in a way that sneaks up on you. Sadie becomes a kind of metaphor for everything Mandy is grappling with: the ghosts of the past, the absurdity of life, the violence of capitalism, and the burden of inherited pain.
The dialogue is whip-smart and incredibly funny — the kind of writing that makes you laugh even as your throat tightens. It captures so much about how people talk around the things they’re afraid to say. But underneath all the humor is a sadness that’s very real. It’s a play about creativity — not just as something we do, but as something we suffer for. It’s about how society chews up people with imagination, how families carry unspoken histories, and how art is sometimes the only way through the wreckage.
I think what moved me most is how honest it is. It doesn’t offer easy answers or neat resolutions. It’s weird and messy and haunted — just like real life. And it’s brilliant.
If you get a chance to see it or read it, please do. Plays like this don’t come around often.
An emotionally spectacular play.
Sadie Hurtz is dark, funny, moving, and completely original — the kind of play that grabs you by the heart and brain at the same time.
At the heart of the story is Mandy Gladstone, a playwright trying to make sense of her enigmatic father Clark, an inventor with a brilliant mind and a complicated past. As Mandy tries to write a play about him, the lines between past and present, truth and invention, begin to blur. What unfolds is part mystery, part memory play, part psychological journey — and all of it deeply human.
There’s also this strange, unforgettable character named Sadie Hurtz — a giant doll shackled to a chair in an abandoned amusement park trailer — who sends threatening postcards that may or may not be real. It sounds surreal (and it is), but it works in a way that sneaks up on you. Sadie becomes a kind of metaphor for everything Mandy is grappling with: the ghosts of the past, the absurdity of life, the violence of capitalism, and the burden of inherited pain.
The dialogue is whip-smart and incredibly funny — the kind of writing that makes you laugh even as your throat tightens. It captures so much about how people talk around the things they’re afraid to say. But underneath all the humor is a sadness that’s very real. It’s a play about creativity — not just as something we do, but as something we suffer for. It’s about how society chews up people with imagination, how families carry unspoken histories, and how art is sometimes the only way through the wreckage.
I think what moved me most is how honest it is. It doesn’t offer easy answers or neat resolutions. It’s weird and messy and haunted — just like real life. And it’s brilliant.
If you get a chance to see it or read it, please do. Plays like this don’t come around often.
Was an actor in a staged reading of Sadie Hurtz and was incredibly impressed with how the story was heartfelt and wild at the same time. There is a deep grounding and heart to the dark carnival strangeness that surrounds it.
Haunting and dark…peculiar and gutting…wrought with both visceral psychological tension and deep, deep heart, I haven’t stopped thinking about this play since I first heard it. Such a rich world with such finely tuned characters, relationships, and dynamics; this play is a Twilight Zone style mind-fuck (in the best possible way,) and I cannot WAIT to see it brought to life on stage. So good
Sadie Hurtz is a terrific and terrifying journey that showcases Joshua Fardon’s talent for crafting psychologically rich and theatrically compelling stories. It is a play that lingers in the mind long after the final
page, earning its place as a standout piece in contemporary theater.
Review Sadie Hurtz.