A Play that Takes You Back to the Present Opens at The Players Theater May 4th to 11th.

When Caroline Dunaway sat down to write her first draft of “Time Biter” she crafted it the way all great playwrights do: drunk. “I just thought, ‘This will be an exercise, no one’s going to read it,’” says Dunaway. “I got drunker and drunker as I wrote the first draft, woke up the next day and reread it and thought that it was actually pretty good.”

Audiences seem to agree. Dunaway and her team are about to open the fourth run of “Time Biter;” the previous three versions premiered as parts of festivals.

“Time Biter” follows the aging actress Stella on her 75th birthday in the year 2067. When gifted a time travel simulator by her granddaughter, she travels back to relive a day in 2019. The young Stella is a struggling actor pounding the pavement for jobs. Much of Stella’s situation Dunaway borrowed from her own life. “I was just noticing a lot of trends in the industry that were frustrating to me in the post #MeToo world that we were supposed to be living in,” she says. “I was still seeing a lot of inappropriate behavior that shouldn’t have still been happening in 2019.”

The original run of “Time Biter” did not go as planned. Dunaway wrote the show in 2019, and it was supposed to appear in a few festivals in 2020. But she says the delay in the show’s premiere was “a blessing in disguise, because I went back to it and revised and revised and I think I came out with a punchier script.”

With every version that premiered Dunaway revised more, and the upcoming run of “Time Biter” will have the longest script yet. Earlier versions ran for around 30 minutes (with a 30 page script) due to the time restraints of performing at festivals. Festivals also presented other restraints including budgeting and working around other shows. “You’re running alongside four other shows at any given time and sometimes you gotta be able to pack up and be out of there that night,” says Director Laura Colleluori who has been with the show since its initial run. This is the first version of the show with breathing room in the budget, so Dunaway could bring on designers and other creatives to help with the show some extra oomph.

Dunaway met producer and actor Samuel Neagley (who went to college with Collelouri) while the two were both struggling actors in Los Angeles and they became friends. Just before COVID hit Neagley and his partner, Clayton Smith, started Blue Otter Theatre Company. “The point of this production company is to uplift bold new voices in the arts through original comedy,” says Neagley. After acting in “Time Biter” last year at the SoHo Playhouse, Neagley decided to use Blue Otter to help produce the current version of the show.

But the show still doesn’t have quite the budget that Dunaway and her team dream of, especially when it comes to creating a sci-fi world of the future. “Carolyn and I will send each other photos back and forth of shows that have all these really amazing high tech elements,” says Collelouri. “There’s so many cool design things that you could do there that we would need a lot more money and permanence for.” One thing she noted was the desire to have two actresses playing old and young Stella; at the moment Dunaway plays both roles.

When it comes to permanence, Dunaway believes “that longevity of a run is something that I think the show deserves.” The current run is only three weeks, but with a longer run there could be more investment in grander more intricate sets and other design elements. “I would love to set ‘Time Biter” up for a longer off- or off-off-Broadway run.” With the trajectory the show is taking it might get there. When “Time Biter” originally premiered at the Emerging Artists Theatre in October 2021 it opened to a sold out house. It went on to do two runs at the SoHo Playhouse, and will now be at The Players Theatre in Greenwich Village.

When living in L.A. Dunaway and her cohort found it difficult to find an enthusiastic audience. Even in New York where there is a larger theater crowd, they’re making a point of having a show that is accessible to people outside of avid theater goers. “A lot of the time people when they have an opportunity to see independent theater, think experimental,” says Neagley. “They think it’s going to be something that’s either intellectually taxing, or maybe a bit artistically fatiguing in some capacity. But this is absolutely a wildly accessible comedy.” Dunaway also commented that it is a great show for date night.

It’s also a show that is written for New Yorkers. When writing it Dunaway incorporated elements of the city. “I really love this city and the city has been pivotal to my growth as an artist and as a human,” she says. “The neighborhoods are woven in. It’s a very New York show.”

If you go

What: “Time Biter” by Caroline Dunaway

Where: The Players Theatre, 115 MacDougal St, New York, NY 10012

When: May 4 - May 21