The Water Men

The American Dream is broken. Meet Shawn McGuire. With vast wealth and deep emptiness he finds himself shipwrecked by his own success.

The American Dream is broken. Meet Shawn McGuire. With vast wealth and deep emptiness he finds himself shipwrecked by his own success. He returns to his hometown of Newport Beach, California in a search for meaning. A return to surfing. Hoping the Pacific will be the cure. Long, sunny beach days are filled with surfing and waiting. Waiting for the next big wave. This well-known beach town attracts a strange breed of people. Shawn ends up rescuing the drowning world around him: A dog, a doctor and a drunk, not in that order. He searches for a girl he once knew and plants trees in the unforgiving desert soil. He tries to reconnect with his aging mother, but she’s busy watching TV. Shawn searches for the vital missing pieces of his soul in the big winter waves of the Pacific, only to find that his soul was never really gone. Merely misplaced.

Adelaide Mackenzie Fuss is a graduate of the UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television. She is a 2003 recipient of the Bush Foundation Artists Fellowship. She has written for both film and stage. Her plays have been produced and commissioned by London’s Royal Court, New York’s Public Theatre and Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum. She lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota with her husband and three children.