Darkly comic and deeply moving by turns, One Flea Spare is set in plague-ravaged 17th Century London where social roles and the boundaries that describe them have turned upside down. The definition of morality is up for grabs. History is being tantalized. Upper and lower class are forced to live in quarantine together and the secrets and sins of the four shut-ins are laid bare. The social hierarchy collapses, and sexual inhibitions are loosened as the prisoners wait for death to strike them down or pass them by. Who, if anyone, will survive?

One Flea Spare is the winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Obie Award for Best Play, and voted The Best of Theatre in 1996 by Time Magazine.

The New Yorker critically hailed the play as, “artful and haunting… One Flea Spare is built to provoke, not to distract, and it doesn’t surrender its meanings easily. But the play’s powerful sexual subtext and its beautiful poetic surface reveal an original theatrical imagination.”