The Exponential Festival Presents: HIGH AND SCARED

The Exponential Festival presents HIGH AND SCARED by MTHR TRSA

Written and Directed by MTHR TRSA

Produced by Buffy Sierra

Find them: @mthrtrsa

HIGH AND SCARED is a multi iteration, theatrical descent into overstimulation, self-consciousness, and the pornographic overconsumption of modern life. It’s a play that spirals through nightlife, broadway and those dark hallways you avoid. Internal demons building a chaotic world that mocks the systems it’s born from. Underneath the humor is a quiet ache: community stretched thin across train cars and dance floors. Sex workers, 9 to 5ers, partygoers, and paper-pushers all end up in the same club. The same train. The same crumbling world. Through the flickering lights of the MTA, we ask: was that really Molly?

CW: This show contains Drug Use, Sexual Content, Strobe, Fog, Nudity.

MTHR TRSA is a multidisciplinary artist working across visual art and performance. She is the founder and director of Hole Pics, a queer performance series currently based at Judson Memorial Church. The series has become an experimental platform for boundary pushing performance, foregrounding risk, irreverence, and queer communion. Recent projects include the original performance work I DON’T THINK THAT WAS MOLLY, presented at CPR - Center for Performance Research under the curation of Alessandra Gomez; and co-direction of EXAM by Buffy at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Across these works, MTHR TRSA continues to interrogate spectacle, risk, and the porous boundaries between chaos and control. In 2025, she was awarded the Rauschenberg Foundation Dancer Grants Program and received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, recognizing the urgency and impact of her evolving practice.

Runtime: 90 min

The Exponential Festival is a 501c3 January performance festival for NYC-based artists working in experimental performance. The participants in this multi-artist, multi-venue festival are committed to ecstatic creativity in the face of commercialism. Exponential is driven by inclusiveness and a diversity of artists, forms, and ideas coupled with utopian resource-sharing, mentoring and the championing of risky, rigorous work in eclectic fields. theexponentialfestival.org