The Hotel Nepenthe

Filled with a crazed assortment of visitors, The Hotel Nepenthe is the site of a bloody murder, a fatal car crash, and plenty of liaisons—dirty and dangerous. Add in a mysterious hat box and a missing baby and you get an unholy mix of David Lynch, Dario Fo, and the E network. Behind it all is genius playwright John Kuntz, who shifts seamlessly between absurdity and deep emotional honesty, keeping audiences uncertain of whether they should be laughing or crying—or ideally doing both at the same time.

“The Hotel Nepenthe is ridiculously funny.”
– Boston lowbrow

“Although the “nepenthe’’ of Kuntz’s title comes from the Greek word for a drug of forgetfulness to alleviate sorrow, ’70s sitcom theme songs are clearly ringing in his head, and every time his plot starts to drift into darker realms, a song snippet yanks his characters back to the land of outrageous humor.”
– Boston Globe

John Kuntz is a founding company member of The Actors Shakespeare Project, where he has played key roles in Much Ado About Nothing, Timon of Athens, The Tempest, King John, Titus Andronicus, and many other productions. He is the author of fourteen plays, including Jasper Lake, which received both the Michael Kanin and Paula Vogel National Playwriting Awards, with productions at the Kennedy Center (Washington, DC) and the New York Fringe Festival.