In the Middle of Grand Central Station

It's the crossroads of New York. It's the hub of Manhattan. It's old. It's beautiful. It's dirty. It's a noisy, anonymous, unforgettable point of departure for hundreds of thousands of people every day. Grand Central Station is the perfect place to visit, but who'd want to live there? Hundreds of people, many of them penniless and all of them lost, call Grand Central home. This is the story of one—a 15-year-old runaway named Marta de Silva. Loosely based on the true story of a young woman who lived in Grand Central for four years, this play examines the search of one very intelligent, warm and troubled human being to find a place of her own in a disintegrating social system. From a broken family to city psychiatric wards and through residential treatment centers, Marty has continued to run—until she reaches the "living room" of the world's most famous train station. Here she finds freedom, friends, dignity, drugs and a kind of hopelessness few American young people can imagine. In the Middle of Grand Central Station is a play about survival and what happens to young people with dreams when the odds are stacked against them. Written in two acts with no scene breaks, the action of the story is bridged by Marty's inner voice, which narrates her psychological journey from a confident beginning to a tragic end.