TIME PASSES (for Ellen Brody)

from VIRGINIA WOOLF'S To the Lighthouse and Stephen Spielberg's Jaws

TARGET MARGIN THEATER | New York, NY | January 2026

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Time is passing strangely for Ellen Brody. The long night seemed to have set in. That’s just the way it goes when you’re the wife from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. TIME PASSES is a new work grafted together from the unlikely combination of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and the movie Jaws.

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"The bizarro frolic 'Time Passes' takes much of its language from the second part of Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” The directors, Chloe Claudel and Mitchell Polonsky, constructed their oddball mash-up by confronting their Woolf with another beast entirely: the shark from “Jaws.” In one of the season’s great surprise entrances, a big gray blob in the middle of the Target Margin warehouse space inflates, expanding, over the course of several long minutes, into a life-size Great White. (It keeps getting bigger. Do we need a bigger theater?) . . . Why are these radically different texts so weirdly comfortable together? The simultaneous sense of environmental fragility and threat in the two pieces might be one point of comparison; the corrosion of salt air and the way it quickens death is another." ​

- Helen Shaw, THE NEW YORK TIMES

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