A family stands on a porch in Montana. The father bundles lavender. The daughter pokes at the dirt with a stick. The mother stares out toward the horizon. The sky is a deep red. The air is thick with smoke. The child coughs. A disheveled young man walks onto the porch. He touches the mother’s hand gingerly, then tousles the daughter’s hair. Neither acknowledges him. Then, he sees the father. He falls to the floor, sobbing. The sky is a deep red. Fade to black.
This is the beginning of “Deer Farm,” the debut play by Avery Violet Epstein ’28, which was awarded Vassar College’s 2026 Phillip Cook Aspiring Playwright Prize. Several people involved in the show said they were blown away by the play’s depth and craft. As a dear friend of Epstein’s, I could not agree more. To see this stunning achievement come to life was a true joy to witness.
“Deer Farm” is wonderfully layered and deeply emotional, immensely horrifying yet funny. It challenges the viewer to consider how we move through a world in which the deaths of millions of strangers are more immediate than they have ever been, thanks to the phones and laptops we use near-constantly. And yet the screens sanitize the horror into a state of unreality.
The play follows two storylines that slowly merge. The first is the farm family, who interacts with a series of duos: two stoners, a documentarian and cameraman, a father and son. In each scene, the family utters eerily similar dialogue and seems remarkably unalarmed that so many strangers are walking onto their porch.
“This is a homestead. We homestead,” the farm father, Jude, says to each duo. “Peaches, apples, potatoes, and lavender: we sell oil. No cattle. This is a deer farm. You know anything about that?”
The second storyline is a young man and woman—named simply Boy and Girl—who have reunited on a Brooklyn rooftop after over a year. Boy, home for the first time since dropping out of college, is a philosophizing dirtbag. Girl, a photographer and idealist, is still in high school. She hopes their lives will find a way to intertwine again.
As the scenes progress, Boy reveals his new business idea: traveling to locations in imminent danger, interviewing people who will soon die and then creating virtual reality (VR) experiences of their last days in which consumers can have lifelike conversations with them.
It is revealed that the farm family is a subject of this project, whose house was consumed by a wildfire. The nature of the family’s interactions with the strangers retroactively becomes clear: the documentarian and cameraman film their last days; the stoners and father and son are in the VR experience, speaking not with the real family but with their digital doppelgängers. The concept is more visceral as a play, Epstein said, because the family is physically in the space with the audience. As it is revealed that they are only digital recreations, Epstein described, “You get to feel in your body and mind how that changes your interaction to them and how you perceive other people’s interactions to them.”
The VR idea originally came from a conversation with high school friends, Epstein told me. “I always kind of toyed with it in my mind,” she said, “because I thought it was sort of fascinating, and how vulgar it felt, and also not that far out.” The setting came from Epstein’s brief stint working on a deer farm in Hauteville, Switzerland, during her gap year in 2023.
As director Charlotte Davis ’28 told me, “Deer Farm” does not have a single message but instead asks two questions that the audience must answer for themselves: “One, how do we want to be remembered? But two, what role do we play in the media that we consume?”
So much of what we are forced to contend with when we open the news or social media is the incomprehensible magnitude of death happening all around us. This constant flood of devastation does not disappear when we turn off our phones: It is always pushing at our backs, when we order a coffee or complain too much about a bad grade on a paper.
The VR project, Boy argues, turns its subjects back into real people and is ultimately humanizing rather than exploitative. It gives them their only chance to be full-fledged individuals rather than just one more drop in the ever-rising tide of the general idea of “bad.”
“It’s sort of horrible to think about,” Davis told me. “The idea of filming people who you know are going to die—before they do—and not providing them the concrete abilities to get out of the situation that is putting their life in danger is so awful and so human, in the worst way.”
Margalit Eisenstein ’28, who played a character in each duo the family meets, agreed with Davis. But, she added, “I do think it is sort of humanizing to have people explain their lives as if it isn’t just like a pure tragedy and something they do just live with and is normal.”
I asked my interviewees if the VR experience was put on exhibition at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, whether they would go see it. “Oh, I probably would, wouldn’t I?” Epstein said. “And so would you. And then you’d write a scathing article.” Eisenstein told me, “I think if it’s in a sort of controlled environment, it would be interesting to really throw yourself in it.”
“I think I would just have to go because I’d be curious,” said Jack Frederick ’28, who played Jude.
Frederick lost his own father in 2024. “I think to engage with it for me, but also, honestly, for it to exist, I think it’s disrespectful,” he said. “Everybody has a certain amount of time on this earth. And it can be tragic how short the time is. But to try and extend that, it almost feels like it’s disrespectful to the fact that he died.” He continued, “It would be like if you had a torch burning, and then, all of a sudden, the torch burnt down and you’re like, ‘Oh, I have a flashlight…’ You can still see, but it’s not like there’s any warmth coming from the fire.”
Frederick was in the unique position to contend with the play’s idea. “It’s hard to watch Ellis [Rubin ’26, who played the son, Tyler]…have this thing where he can come and touch the dad. That’s a weird experience for me to just watch that happen.”
Nonetheless, he said, “If I had a VR experience to go talk to my dad the week before he died, I don’t think I would do it… When someone’s gone, you just have to work on how it affects you… You gotta choose life.”
Ultimately, Epstein said, the idea is not really futuristic. During her gap year, Epstein visited the Sydney Jewish Museum in Australia, which features interactive holograms of Holocaust survivors created through extensive interviews and artificial intelligence. Visitors can ask the survivors questions, and they respond, just as the visitors in “Deer Farm” speak across time and space with a family on a farm in Montana.
Whether we like it or not, it is only a matter of time until “Deer Farm” is real. Epstein told me, “It will exist.”