GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER takes place in a Philadelphia of the present where perpetual global war, climate crisis and petty interpersonal conflicts both suffocate and sustain the negative emotional states of late capitalism, helping us all forget about, or come to terms with the fact that the Holmesburg Prison Experiments are still ongoing. It follows Joseph Thomas over one long shift in a North Philly emergency department where he works as tech. He’s just returned from Baghdad as a medic with a GI Bill and a dream. Struggling to build true emotional relationships with other adult black people, especially other men, he is also an MD/PhD student at The University of Pennsylvania. Through no accident of his own, Joseph ends up studying and writing about the Holmesburg experiments himself, wherein he gets to know his father, who has long been one of the primary subjects of skin experimentation by Johnson & Johnson and Dow Chemical. His best friend, a visual artist named Ray who is also from Philly and worked closely with him in Baghdad thinks he’s crazy, but loves him, and follows along anyway.

Over the course of the hospital shift we encounter friends and lovers, family and kin from Joseph’s past, present, and future, whereby the emergency department as primary care becomes a hub for the surrounding community and contemporary moment. Trying to balance his interpersonal life as a single dad, Iraq War vet, and exhausted lover working twelve-hour shifts as a medic brings him closer than he ever imagined to his own father, and consequently, the broader socio political struggles beginning in Philly and expanding across the globe. Focusing on the relationships between care and money, time and grief, power and politics, Joseph finds himself both closer and further away than he ever imagined to the people who made him.