The World Is Burning and Everyone’s on Instagram—SMOKE Opens May 22

photo by Michael Thibodeau

Originally published by RVA Magazine
by RVA Staff
May 21, 2025

A horror-comedy about America’s favorite pastime—looking the other way.

It starts with a wedding on a mountaintop. A shiny McMansion. Fancy coffee. Everyone posting the perfect angle of their happiness. But something’s off—and no one wants to talk about it.

Produced by Cadence and opening tomorrow at Firehouse Theatre, SMOKE is a new horror-comedy by Juilliard grad and former Richmond actor Enid Graham. It’s got laughs, sure—but the kind that catch in your throat.

Graham began writing the play during grad school, starting with an image: people in a mountain mansion, distracted by luxury, oblivious to the chaos playing out below. “Then I thought,” she says, “that sounds like America right now.” That was three years ago. If anything, the fire feels closer now.

SMOKE takes place in that well-appointed house filled with well-meaning people arguing about hashtags while the world quietly unravels outside. Graham skewers our obsession with digital noise, the way we mistake engagement for action. “Social media makes you feel like you’re saying something,” she says, “when you’re really not.” Eventually, she got off Facebook and Twitter altogether—tired of fighting with ghosts from high school.

Directed by Anna Senechal Johnson and featuring a powerhouse local cast—Gordon Bass, Maggie Horan, Laine Satterfield, Debra Wagoner, and more—the production looks to tap into a slow-building dread that feels all too familiar. It doesn’t aim to comfort.

And Graham knows actors. As a longtime performer herself, she writes from the inside out. Her dialogue doesn’t just sound real—it moves like real people trying, and failing, to say the right thing. She wrote the play in subway tunnels, backstage dressing rooms, and between parenting moments—the kind of writing born not from luxury, but necessity.

SMOKE doesn’t promise a tidy ending—it offers a crack in the dam. It’s an opening for the conversations we keep avoiding: climate change, division, and the way capitalism keeps us fighting over crumbs while the real problems burn quietly in the background. “We are all in this same boat,” Graham says, “and as long as we keep chopping at it with axes, we will sink.”

The play runs May 22 to June 7 at Firehouse Theatre. A post-show talkback with Graham and members of the creative team follows the May 23 performance. Tickets and more information are available HERE.