Featured in the Press Republican on Thursday July 17 – link to full story here.
Robin Caudell, The Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, N.Y.
Thu, July 17, 2025
WESTPORT — “Every Brilliant Thing” director Chan Harris returns to the Depot Theatre this season to interface white-box tech in the fast-paced black comedy “Radiant Vermin,” written by Philip Ridley, an internationally acclaimed “master of the modern myth.”
North Country audiences get a preview performance tonight in Westport of the play, which premiered in 2015 at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol, before transferring to Soho Theatre in London.
Set in contemporary Britain, a young couple, Ollie (Peter Corley) and Jill (Laura Menzie), live in the Red Ocean Estates, when they receive a sticky offer from stranger Miss Dee/Kay (Emily Abruzzi) to own their dream home and leave public housing forever.
Ollie and Jill are lower-middle class, educated, not too well-connected and try too hard to be fashionable.
“It was a new play to me, but I really liked it when I first read it,” Harris said. “He’s very British. Not in a bad way, but in a really good way. The way that the Brits generally … this is kind of a gross overgeneralization, even when they speak they sound polite typically whether they are or not. Their general sense of manners is often more oppressive than the way we use manners if that makes sense. They don’t ever want to step over the lines of propriety in general. That’s not true for everyone in Britain, of course, but the general feel of the country is a lightness kind of guides a lot of things. Doing the right thing in a sense.
“If this story was to take place in America, it would be a different story than it is. There are some very heavy conditions that they don’t realize when they say yes to the house. There are some very conditions attached, but they have to figure out how to make it work.”
Link to full story on the Press Republican here as well as on Yahoo! Entertainment here.