We're Doomed
On Halloween, Sarasota has no shortage of costumes, cocktails and elaborately staged revelry.
By Edit Sarasota Staff
On Halloween, Sarasota has no shortage of costumes, cocktails and elaborately staged revelry. But “We’re Doomed” offers a different kind of occasion: an invitation to sit with the darker, stranger questions that performance can make impossible to ignore. The title is blunt, funny and just ominous enough to suggest an evening less interested in easy answers than in the pleasure of confronting uncertainty together.
That makes the event a fitting addition to Sarasota’s performing-arts calendar. In a city known for polished productions and grand cultural institutions, there is equal value in work that feels immediate—work that can unsettle the room, provoke conversation and remind audiences that theatre is not simply something to admire from a distance. It is a live exchange, shaped by the presence of everyone gathered there.
The title’s plural pronoun matters. “We’re” places the audience and performers in the same predicament, whatever that predicament may be. “Doomed” can carry the weight of catastrophe, but it can also be comic, theatrical and unexpectedly liberating. On a night devoted to ghosts and disguises, the phrase opens up plenty of possibilities: a meditation on the future, a dark comedy about human habits, or an encounter with the absurdity of trying to make sense of the world. The most compelling performances often begin in that space between anticipation and uncertainty.
Bowne’s Lab, in the Hegner Theatre Wing, is an apt setting for an event with such an intriguing name. A lab suggests experimentation—the chance to see artists testing form, mood and ideas in close quarters rather than presenting culture as something sealed behind glass. In an intimate theatre environment, a pause can feel charged, a laugh can travel through the room, and the audience’s reaction becomes part of the evening’s atmosphere.
For Sarasota, that kind of gathering is more than a Halloween alternative. It is part of the ongoing conversation about what local performing arts can be: adventurous without being remote, thoughtful without losing its sense of play, and willing to leave audiences with questions that linger after the lights come up.
“We’re Doomed” takes place Saturday, October 31, 2026, at Bowne’s Lab in the Hegner Theatre Wing. On a night built for theatrical transformation, it promises a chance to trade the familiar frights for something more open-ended—and perhaps more revealing.