After a night where sexual pleasure mixed with traumatic memory causes her body to shut down, 31-year-old Caroline Rothstein decides: no more penetrative sex, unless it’s a partner with whom she wants to share not only her future, but also her past.

Caroline’s a sexual person. She likes—loves—sex. And yet, she feels a deeper journey taking place. A kind of spiritual cleanse.

She tells herself that if she’s going to let someone in, they need to understand that her body—this instrument of pleasure with which they seek to play—has been a site of both joy, and also pain.

“Come Inside” is about that: coming inside. Or cumming inside. Or neither. Or both. About how, by the time Caroline reaches her late thirties, having not let anyone inside—her vagina, her body, her home, her heart—she comes (pun intended) to realize what she’s discovered from within.

And then, well…see the show to find out if someone else gets to come inside with her.

Caroline Rothstein (she/her) is an internationally touring and award-winning writer, poet, performer, educator, and New York Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker. Her work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, InStyle, Narratively, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, Hey Alma, and elsewhere. Caroline and her work have been featured widely including in The New Yorker, MTV News, Chicago Tribune, CBS Evening News, BuzzFeed News, HuffPost, Mic, and Newsweek. She tours year-round performing spoken word poetry, public speaking, facilitating workshops and teaching at colleges, schools, performance venues, summer camps, companies, and community organizations worldwide. Caroline is also a facilitator for the Dialogue Arts Project, an instructor at Narratively Academy, an adjunct lecturer at Baruch College, and has been on faculty for the Avodah Institute for Social Change and Foundation for Jewish Camp’s annual Cornerstone Fellowship. Her award-winning one-woman play “faith” about her experience with and recovery from an eating disorder debuted as part of the Culture Project’s Women Center Stage 2012 Festival, directed by Alex Mallory. Caroline was an Associate Producer on Andrea B. Scott’s “Florence, Arizona,” a producer on “We Were Once Kids,” which debuted in the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival, and an executive producer and co-director for the NY Emmy-nominated “How To Build a City.” She has a B.A. in classical studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Alex Mallory (she/her) is a Chicago-based director, educator, and Director of The Metal Shop Performance Lab, currently touring a community-engaged production of MY NAME IS RACHEL CORRIE. She recently directed the extended world premiere of Sadieh Rifai’s THE CAVE for A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago, recipient of an Equity Jeff Award Nomination for New Work. Alex is a director and educator for The Theatre School at DePaul University and facilitates a healing-centered engagement program for military veterans. In New York City, Alex directed and developed new works as Co-Artistic Director of Poetic Theater Productions and Director of Culture Project’s Women Center Stage Initiative, including award-winning productions of Caroline Rothstein’s first one-woman play FAITH and Takeo Rivera’s choreopoem GOLIATH, which toured for seven years through New York and California. She holds an MFA in Directing from Northwestern University and a BA from Stanford University, where she received the Louis Sudler Prize in Creative Arts and the Sherifa Omade Edoga Prize for work involving social issues. She is a proud member of the Stage Directors & Choreographers Society.