Furlough's Paradise Tickets

On a three-day furlough from prison, Sade returns to a world she barely recognizes—and to Mina, the cousin who isn’t sure how to let her back in. As memories surface and tensions simmer, the two navigate the fractured terrain of family, grief, and love, confronting the choices that shaped their lives and the futures they might have had.

Winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Furlough’s Paradise is a tender, lyrical new play about memory, connection, and the pursuit of freedom—personal, political, and ancestral. With heartache, humor, and a deep longing for something like home, a.k. payne offers a powerful portrait of Black kinship and the strength it takes to choose one another again and again. A poetic meditation on survival, reconnection, and the everyday work of imagining a more liberated future.