Christopher Paul Richards presents Crush, a play in one act. Performing at The New York Theatre Festival and the Off-Off-Broadway theatre Box of Moonlight. Starring Dylan Pitanza, Chloe Margot, Malina Weissman, and Maia Benarouche.

After a controversial sexual interaction on a first date, two teens find themselves fractured, spiralling in repression and self-analysis. Yearning for clarity, they inadvertently meet one year after the interaction to tear each other apart. Do they match each other's freak? Or are they both traumatized? Is it love? Is it fate? Or are we just in hell? Through exploring the two wounded souls of Cherry and Billie, this play is a painfully raw and honest exposé of how trauma affects sexual desire, love, and connection. We watch them work through their trauma in real time to learn to love one another, despite the pain it takes to face themselves.

We've been developing this play over the past two years, beginning as a workshop at NYU in which we were awarded the Tisch School of the Arts Collaborative Arts Grant, which has allowed us to now take our production to the public with a premiere at the festival and a full run afterwards.

We have completely self-financed this play, valuing honest, unfiltered storytelling over commercial success. This is why we need your help. With a donation, you can help fund an original, exciting play with roots in the Off-Off Broadway theater scene of the 60s/70s and become part of a community of artists creating a new movement in the theater world, as we approach a moment in history where independent art will take center stage, as it has in past movements!