This Greenville Journal article by Paul Hyde was originally published on December 4th, 2025. Photo: Paul Mehaffey
What does a woman do when a video game intrudes upon her marriage, becoming an unwelcome third wheel?
That’s the question at the heart of Bekah Brunstetter’s comedy “The Game,” about a man named Homer who loses his job and promptly becomes addicted to an online video game.
His wife Alyssa sets out to wrest Homer from the clutches of his obsession.
“Along the way, Alyssa finds a community of women who share in her plight with their own spouses,” said Caroline Jane Davis, who is directing the Warehouse Theatre’s production of “The Game,” running Dec. 5-21.
“The strategies they use to get their partners to stop playing the game become increasingly absurd,” she said.
Though Brunstetter’s comedy touches on serious themes, the six-person play zips forward on witty one-liners and lots of physical humor, Davis said.
“The play is really about how and why so many people escape into something digital when life gets hard and how the answer to that lies in real human connection,” said Davis, a visiting assistant professor of theater at Furman University.
“The Game,” which premiered only last year, continues the Warehouse’s annual holiday tradition of presenting a non-holiday-oriented play.
Brunstetter is an American playwright, screenwriter and television writer who received a Tony nomination for “The Notebook” musical.
“The Game” was inspired, in part, by Aristophanes’ ancient comedy “Lysistrata,” about women who withhold sex to force the men in their lives to stop making war.
The women in “The Game” engage in a similar sex strike as one of their strategies to influence their spouses.
The online video game that dominates the lives of characters in the play is not named but it resembles many games where heroes struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.
Davis directed a production of “The Game” at Horizon Theatre Company in Atlanta last summer, only a few months after the world premiere of the play at PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, N.C.
At the Warehouse, Davis last directed the comedic hit “ODD” in 2023 for the theater’s 50th season.
She emphasized that audiences don’t have to love — or hate — video games to enjoy “The Game.”
