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This literary masterpiece by one of the world's greatest authors is brought to vibrant life in this new adaptation. Four estranged brothers unexpectedly come together in their father's village, knowing that one intends to commit a terrible crime, but not knowing which of them will do it. Every fact, every motive, every belief about human nature, faith and redemption are questioned in this dynamic quest for truth."Anthony Clarvoe's adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is a grand achievement, a reminder of how good theater can be. This excellent show satisfies and impresses in equal measure." -Terry Morgan, Variety"THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV has been my steady companion since opening night. It's a dazzling, existential whodunit about patricide, the existence of God and the anatomy of human nature. Clarvoe is among contemporary American dramatists pioneering a different path along common ground, that uses American experience, language that is both rich and familiar, behavior that is both complex and identifiable, to find a non-threatening yet provocative and challenging way into the classics." -Jackie Demaline, The Cincinnati Enquirer"Clarvoe's carefully wrought play is richly layered, with bold comedic touches leavening the serious themes. THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV addresses the mind, the spirit and the funny bone, and will not quickly be forgotten." -Patricia Corrigan, St Louis Post-Dispatch"Clarvoe's ability to take moments of the past and make them highly magnified, slightly unfocused and yet strangely rational views of today, has been shown before; his plays THE LIVING and SHOW AND TELL had successful productions …" -Joe Pollack, Variet

Couplehood and infidelity are subject to scrutiny in Anthony Clarvoe's oblique ode to LA RONDE. "Mr Clarvoe, previously represented in New York by PICK UP AX, a comedy about corporate intrigue in Silicon Valley that got good reviews when it was produced by 29th Street Rep in 1995, finds himself in an unusual position for a young playwright: two of his works are running concurrently in Manhattan. Besides LET'S PLAY TWO, which he wrote several years ago, his newest play, WALKING OFF THE ROOF, is being presented by the Signature Theater Company, the estimable Off-Broadway troupe that devotes each season to the work of one living American playwright. John Guare is the company's featured writer this year; Mr Clarvoe's play has been shepherded to production through a separate program for mid-career playwrights. Like LET'S PLAY TWO, WALKING OFF THE ROOF is an attempt to clear the spoiled air between men and women, only Mr Clarvoe's concern in this case is the end of relationships, not the beginning. With a nod to Harold Pinter's BETRAYAL, the play details a roundel of infidelities committed by a pair of couples, one married, the other not."Peter Marks, The New York Times "Anthony Clarvoe's fine ear for dialogue, and the sputterings of men and women ensnared by longing, juices his nervous, edgy roundelay depicting several couples and their bed manners. Sadness and disconnectedness reign with poignance, wit, and credibility."Laurie Stone, Village Voice

This collection includes twelve short and very short plays: CHARLOTTE, LIZZY, PAOLA AND ANDREA AT THE ALTAR OF WORDS, PHONE CALL IN THE RAIN, THE SHOWER, THE BOOK OF FISHES, YELLOW, THE FALL OF THE SPARROW, LESSONS FOR AN UNACCUSTOMED BRIDE, LOUISA, IMPACT, and SERMON FOR SENSES.Broadway Play Publishing Inc has published eight of José Rivera's full-length plays, including CLOUD TECTONICS and REFERENCES TO SALVADOR DALÍ MAKE ME HOT.His screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries was nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, making him the first Puerto Rican writer to be nominated for an Academy Award.

Abraham Zobell is a man like other men. No better, not much worse. But, unlike other men, he has a vital need to lay flowers on an ocean grave before it's too late. Though he's recovering from a recent heart attack, Abe rejects the pleas of his wife and the advice of his doctors, rips out his IV, and sets out on a pilgrimage to the sea. Along the way, he encounters ghosts and memories, music and moonlight, pilgrim strangers, and even stranger friends. "Len Jenkin not only has a vivid imagination, but he also has an artist's command of his craft."New York Times "Len Jenkin has an unusual talent for reaching into shadowy places in the human psyche and coming up with evocative images."Journal American (Seattle) "Jenkin's plays have plenty of plot and delicious language, but the transience of experience is the main theme that runs through Jenkin's work. He manipulates theatrical illusions with a playful manner that recalls Jorge Luis Borges, to disguise meditations on mortality."Village Voice (New York)

"IN A PIG'S VALISE is a musical comedy spoof of the hot-cool private-eye pulp fiction associated with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Except that it's wilder, much wilder. VALISE, among other oddities, features a stubby villain named Shrimp Bucket, an 'ethnic dancer' heroine named Dolores Con Leche (or, as the gumshoe hero, James Taxi, calls her, Sadness With Milk) and, in a bit part homage to Hammett's real-life lover, an undercover F B I agent named Lillian Hellman... Spiced with songs by August Darnell (Kid Creole) that bear such lines as 'Kiss me deadly' and 'Never judge a thriller by its cover' ... [a] broad, winking satire of the language and plot conventions of the old books and movies."Richard Christiansen, The Chicago Tribune

Ibsen's 1881 masterpiece finds a fresh interpretation in Anthony Clarvoe's taut adaptation in which a woman has to face her legacy of religious and sexual repression when her grown son comes home to tell her that he has an incurable sexually transmitted disease and asks her to help him die with dignity.

NO GOOD DEED revolves around the interconnecting stories of three troubled heroes, including a Richard Jewell-like security guard; a firefighter who has rescued a toddler from a well; and lonely teen Josh Jaxon, a budding graphic novelist whose "Hellbound Hero" comes to life as his alter ego."In a lot of ways, I want to hold this production up to the producers of SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK and say, 'This is how you put a graphic novel on stage.'" -Talkin' Broadway"Pelfrey has fashioned a bracingly cerebral and nerve-rattling piece." -Backstage"The twenty-something dudes that really like comic books and video games and seeing people get their asses kicked would totally think NO GOOD DEED is the most awesome play of all time." -The LAist

Uncle Sam was a novelties salesman who died one night, alone and broke, in a Pittsburgh hotel. But he was also a larger-than-life figure, a mythic hero, to his nephew - who now seeks to discover his uncle's true story. His quest is a quixotic and picaresque one, involving a seductive nightclub singer who promises to marry Sam if he can locate his ne'er-do-well brother (who absconded with the proceeds from a robbery), and developing into a series of sometimes funny, sometimes hair-raising episodes as the nephew "becomes" his uncle in his youth and journeys to a remote lighthouse, a rather sinister university laboratory, an opium den, the clinic of a Mexican quack, and a very odd miniature golf course - all intriguingly distorted, as though viewed through a funhouse mirror. In the end it is really the landscape of the mind that is explored and illuminated, as the trail leads back to Old Sam and the disquieting knowledge that dreams and reality are, in the final essence, often one and the same, with the "truth" still remaining tantalizingly out of reach."Mr. Jenkin's play is in the first place a loving but rarified pulp-fiction parody, full of ingenious and peculiar turns of language." -The Village Voice"Jenkin's plays are, in a sense, loony detective stories, a pilgrim's progress through thickets of American hype and ignorance." -The New York Daily News"By the end of this imaginative evening, one could say that the play is a journey of self-discovery, a pop art fairy tale, or an investigation into the American psyche." -BackStage"... it's a wonderful piece, astonishingly imaginative and challenging." -The Bergen Record

FIVE OF US deals with the parallel lives of New York tenement dwellers, who live next door to each other but whose paths do not cross until one fateful moment, which spells disaster for them all. One apartment is occupied by Mark, a young writer who churns out pornography while planning the "big novel" he will someday write, and his live-in girlfriend, Lee, an anthropology grad who works as a waitress. Their next-door neighbor is Herman, a mentally deficient messenger who speaks in a language all his own and amuses himself by calling 800 numbers to make hotel reservations he has no intention of keeping. When Lee is offered a chance to join an anthropological expedition to Sri Lanka, Mark is faced with a crisis - the loss of both her companionship and her income. With the connivance of his ex-con buddy, Eddie, a street-smart would-be mercenary, Mark decides to prop up his finances by robbing Herman's apartment, in the misguided belief that the poor eccentric has been hoarding money. But, instead, what they find is the bizarre detritus of a stunted life - a life which is abruptly ended when Herman, coming upon them, is startled into a fatal epileptic fit. Fearful and guilt-ridden, Mark and Eddie try to cover their tracks - but as the play ends it is also clear that no matter how far or fast they flee they will never escape the spectre of the lonely misfit whose pathetic world they have so thoughtlessly and fatally shattered."FIVE OF US is a 10. Jenkin has a real genius for character." -The Hollywood Reporter"... it proves that he not only has a vivid imagination but that he also has an artist's command of his craft." -The New York Times"... a gripping, haunting experience that can't be dismissed lightly." -Drama-Logue"... full of surprises and subversions, so that the expected keeps failing to happen, and the unexpected keeps happening, in new and absurdly ironic ways ... FIVE OF US is several kinds of a good play." -The Village Voice

A brilliantly conceived and highly theatrical experience in absurdist drama, in which the audience is taken on a wild and funny metaphysical journey into the fertile imaginations of the diverse characters whose bizarre stories are deftly interwoven into the fabric of the play. DARK RIDE is comprised of a series of vignettes involving characters who, at first, appear to bear no relation to each other. A mysterious figure gives a scholar an ancient manuscript to translate; a thief steals an enormous jewel; a woman assures us that life is all coincidence; a dream-like waitress serves her customers all manner of thoughts and suggestions but no food. The images are bizarrely funny and provocative and, in time, coalesce into a pattern of driving concerns and obsessions that come into focus when the various characters finally meet at an oculists convention in Mexico City. Phantasmagoric, the play takes us on a journey that, in the final essence, transcends the physical world to explore the inner recesses of the mind."The trip itself, like a spooky show in a carnival tunnel, is full of bright, surprising images, scary and funny." -The Village Voice"... funny, rich, erudite, playful, assured." -Soho News"Few playwrights have Jenkin's skill at theatrical sleight-of-hand ... it supplies an ingenuity which cannot fail to stimulate both the theatre and the theatregoer." -The New York Daily News

A kaleidoscopic, surrealistic overview of contemporary America, set forth in the bizarre, highly theatrical style which characterizes this writer's distinctive voice. Produced by New York's highly regarded Public Theater, the play employs brilliantly imaginative avante-garde techniques to highlight both the dreams - and delusions - which infuse and motivate our modern world. The play is made up of a series of concurrent actions, some set in a tacky motel, some elsewhere, involving a group of disparate but curiously related people. There is the young night clerk, Pauline, who studies her high-school English Lit notebook, while growing increasingly fearful of the unseen and unwanted suitor who lies in wait in the motel parking lot; a raucous carnival barker touting his giant crocodile, Bonecrusher; a pair of seedy bar denizens who occasionally break into song; a dim-witted handyman, Chuckles, who performs pointless errands; a deranged scientist who believes that he is in contact with creatures from outer space; an abandoned woman who waits restlessly for a lover who will probably never return; and a mysterious drifter, Faber, who, somehow becomes the catalyst which fuses all these divergent elements into a cohesive, and often wildly funny whole. And, in so doing, makes the play both an encapsulation of the American myth and, at the same time, a telling comment on what is right - and wrong - with this myth."... it has a cumulative, atmospheric effect, tantalizing our senses at the same time it creates a haunting iconographic world ... AMERICAN NOTES is itself sui generis - bearing the unmistakably original signature of Len Jenkin." -The New York Times"[AMERICAN NOTES] is a kind of anti-OUR TOWN. The weird backwater in which it's set is a little surreal and a lot seedy, populated by nighthawks, drifters, pimps, and hucksters." -Chicago Reader"Twice as ingeniously written as any play in town ..." -The Village Voice"... a mythic vision of America ..." -Drama-Logue

The mysterious causes and devastating effects of a steel mill explosion are seen through the eyes of a defiant young widow."It's a straightforward enough story, but Nemeth tells it in a way that stunningly recapitulates the crazy-quilt patterns of memory. Creating a collage of time, sensation, inner thought and overt action, she twists the past and the present so that the intensity of pleasure, pain and loss becomes truly excruciating. And in the process, she reminds us of how ephemeral life is, and how crucially important each minute should be, though, of course, never can be." -Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times (Chicago)"MILL FIRE is a tense, brooding piece, a cross between a thriller, a social documentary and a requiem ... Nemeth's subject is pain, whose precise causes may never be known, and she draws its map like a cartographer of hell." -Hugo Williams, The Times (London)

A richly atmospheric, riveting noir peopled with lowdown characters who raise double and triple-crossing to high art."Eric Overmyer [is] one of this nation's most accomplished and vividly imaginative playwrights." -Wayne Johnson, The Seattle Times"In NATIVE SPEECH, ON THE VERGE and IN PERPETUITY THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE, Eric Overmyer manifested a extraordinary command over the tools of language: sound, syntax and image ... In DARK RAPTURE, which premiered at Seattle's Empty Space Theater in May, Overmyer's verbal dexterity is acute as ever, but this time it's harnessed to a plot delivered by characters who seem driven by purposes of their own. It's by far Overmyer's most satisfying play. DARK RAPTURE may not, however, earn its author the critical praise it deserves - it certainly didn't in Seattle - because it adheres so strictly to the rules of the genre. In the written arts, in film, in dance, in pop music, a creative artist's submission to such rules earns no disrespect. In theater, it seems we honor work created within rigid conventions only if the conventions are someone else's: kabuki or kathakali, wayang or noh. DARK RAPTURE is 'noir,' the genre which crystallized in the 1940s novels and screenplays of Raymond Chandler and has intermittently borne fruit ever since in the hands of artists as various as Richard Condon and Wim Wenders. Good noir is rare on stage ... But his DARK RAPTURE is the most successful stage essay in the form since Len Jenkins's marvelous, poetic FIVE OF US. Like many noir fictions, DARK RAPTURE is about escape: from the self, from the sane, from the ordinary. This time the escape hatch is offered by a fire that leaves the Berkeley Hills home of Ray and Julia Gaines a pile of smoldering rubble with a charred and unrecognizable corpse beneath it. Whose corpse is it: Ray's, or a looter's? Just where was Julia when the house burned down? And what happened to the brown-paper parcel Julia says she left in Ray's custody? Did it go up in flames, too, with or without him? Any number of sinister people want to know. In classic noir manner, the story advances tableau by moody tableau from Baja bedroom to Key West bar deck to Tampa kitchenette, each offering its sharply etched character cameo, its fragment of information, its new complication, straight to a conclusion redolent with irony ..." -Roger Downey, American Theater

MI VIDA LOCA - My Crazy Life - tells the story of members of a troubled family who are reunited at their home on Washington's Olympic Peninsula as the father begins treatment for drug addiction."With a handful of plays ... Eric Overmyer has established himself as one of contemporary theater's wittiest playwrights." -Jan Stuart, Seven Days"Eric Overmyer [is] one of this nation's most accomplished and vividly imaginative playwrights." -Wayne Johnson, The Seattle Times

Among the most imaginative works of the 20th century, Eric Overmyer's ON THE VERGE OR THE GEOGRAPHY OF LEARNING captivates with its abundant invention. Three Victorian lady travelers take it upon themselves to discover the mystery of things as they set out for Terra Incognita and discover the future."Cross the wordplay of S J Perelman with the world-in-a-time-warp vision of Caryl Churchill and you might approximate the special flavor of ON THE VERGE. In Eric Overmyer's chimerical new comedy, three Victorian lady explorers set out on an adventure that takes them to darkest Africa, highest Himalaya and Terra Incognita ... Blending Tom Stoppard's limber linguistics with the historic overview of a Thornton Wilder, Mr Overmyer takes his audience on a mirthful safari ... spinning into time travel. Three 'sister sojourners', each a prototypical Victorian lady explorer, equipped with dialog as pithy as their helmets, thwack their machetes through the wilderness while telling tales of past jaunts among the natives. As intrepid trekkers, they put the lie to any charge that they are representatives of a weaker sex. Mr Overmyer has written a play that is joyfully feminist. Heroines to their heart, the explorers can accommodate themselves to any emergency (natural or man-made), although they are momentarily disoriented as they approach modern times. In their kaleidoscopic adventure, they journey through a rain forest of hundreds of artifacts from the future - household utensils, mechanical contrivances and a side-view automobile mirror that reads 'Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear.' How does one deal with such a chimera? ... In the play there is wit within the palaver. As one traveler says, 'I have seen the future and it is slang.' The author himself is an ecologist of language and a shrewd observer of our quest to control our environment - and the environment of others ... A frolicsome jaunt through a continuum of space, time, history, geography, feminism and fashion, Mr Overmyer's cavalcade is on the verge of becoming a thoroughly serendipitous journey." -Mel Gussow, The New York Times

In the first play in LIMBO TALES, HIGHWAY, a man suddenly decides to drive to his girlfriend's house, which is 200 miles away. He becomes obsessed with the thought that each car that passes may be his girlfriend coming to visit him - and as he begins to lose touch with time and place he becomes convinced that he has moved back to another century, another civilization. In the short INTERMEZZO, a Master of Ceremonies announces, in hilarious detail, all the exotic acts that will not be on the bill that evening. In the final play, HOTEL, a down-on-his-luck encyclopedia salesman sits in a flea-bag hotel room, eating Chinese food which is delivered by a disembodied arm, while listening to the squabbling of his neighbors and contemplating the aridity of his limbo-like existence."Len Jenkin not only has a vivid imagination, but he also has an artist's command of his craft." -New York Times"Len Jenkin has an unusual talent for reaching into shadowy places in the human psyche and coming up with evocative images." -Journal American (Seattle)"Jenkin's plays have plenty of plot and delicious language, but the transience of experience is the main theme that runs through Jenkin's work. He manipulates theatrical illusions with a playful manner that recalls Jorge Luis Borges, to disguise meditations on mortality." -Village Voice (New York)"Jenkin explores many of the raw nerve ends in our society; the deep need to believe an absolute, while at the same time reveling in the gratification of the present; the difference between titillation and satisfaction; the bizarre nature of reality; and the real nature of the bizarre." -Times (Seattle)

Both a riff on lounge acts and a lounge act itself. Time Out calls the show, "Enveloping, sad and entirely hilarious, the most fun you'll ever have watching the American Dream disintegrate.""Annie and I saw DREAM EXPRESS last night. I absolutely LOVED the writing, I was blown away. To my ear it is simultaneously sublime and gritty. Both lyric and comic. Cynical and romantic. Dark and light. Annie too was enamored of the writing. 'This town is holding onto the planet by its teeth.' I have been repeating that one and am waiting patiently for a moment in life when I can use it (with attribution). I wish I could be there every night. What a f#%king killer piece of theater." -Paul Lazar, Big Dance Theater

A promising Ethiopian soccer star in Israel is courted by an American sports agent. The athlete is involved with another Ethiopian who risks being deported. Meanwhile, there is also a reckless, clandestine operation afoot to airlift one last group of Falasha Jews from Ethiopia to Israel."In 1996, Israel announced a blood shortage and urged its citizens to give generously. The Falasha-Ethiopian Jews who were new immigrants and eager to embrace their spiritual homeland-turned out in record numbers. A newspaper report later revealed that all of the Ethiopian blood had been discarded, untested, because of a fear of AIDS and other diseases. The Ethiopians were humiliated, and the Israeli government, thrust into damage control, recognized that the people rescued from oppression from Northeast Africa (through airlift operations nobly named 'Moses' and 'Solomon') were now facing discrimination in the very state meant to be a safe harbor for all Jews. Israel's complex relationship with the Falasha (which literally means 'stranger') provides the foundation for A JEW ON ETHIOPIA STREET, Allan Havis's new play." -Caroline Palmer, American Theater"A play about the fascinating story of Ethiopian Jews." -Max Sparber, Citypages

A fantastical "Kafkaesque" journey through time and space."TIME IN KAFKA is a playful, luminous trip ... Len Jenkins's 90-minute fantasy about a young scholar so in love with the work of Franz Kafka that he imagines the famous writer's spirit has appeared to tell him the whereabouts of a lost manuscript. What ensues is a poetic and often hilarious meditation on the mystical connection between writer and ardent - part dream reverie, part time travel and often mesmerizing theater ..." -Martha Heimberg, Turtle Creek News"TIME IN KAFKA is full of literary allusions, but it doesn't feel much like the work of its eponym, Franz Kafka. It's more like Thomas Mann on psychedelics." -Lawson Taitte, Dallas Morning News"'Time in Kafka is always broken. Every moment leads back to itself. Chronological and eternal.' The opening (and closing) lines for Len Jenkin's new play TIME IN KAFKA could not be more concise in their description of Kafka and the play itself, a fun romp ..." -Jennifer Smart, Pegasus News"... one surprise after another ... a vibrant celebration." -Christopher Soden, Arts & Culture Magazine

L J Freeman - beloved quarterback for the current Super Bowl champs, "American hero," husband to a beautiful woman, father to two young children - has made a really terrible, really stupid mistake. His senseless crime was caught on a security video which is now all over the media; his football career is over; his family is falling apart - and his nine-year-old has seen what her daddy did. With dark humor, WOOF examines the very raw, honest story of one man watching his world crumble around him and discerning what he must do to move forward."Playwright Y York is getting at something very interesting in WOOF, her bold drama ... In fact she's digging up a whole tangle of thorny reflections about race, celebrity, parent-child relationships, infidelity, the need to stop poisoning our planet and heaven knows what else. At times you think York has taken on too much, then somehow she makes a persuasive connection and the idea that seemed out of left field proves pertinent to her peculiarly gripping narrative. Yet even more than what York is saying it's how she says it that makes WOOF challenging and rewarding. She'll make one point obliquely so that it sneaks up on you, then land the next one smack on the nose ... the upshot is WOOF keeps surprising you ... keeps ringing true ..." -Everett Evans, Houston Chronicle"Y York's WOOF is one of those rare pieces of theater that scream brilliance, perfection, and soulfulness from beginning to end. WOOF in its purest essence is about relationships, particularly family relationships, under extreme pressure. It is about life. It is about love. It is about making mistakes. It is about forgiveness and redemption. It is funny. It is theater at its finest and most blindingly brilliant." -Buzz Bellmont, Houston Chronicle online

Subtitled "A History of Science (A Chronicle of Folly, Wisdom, and Madness)," PORT TWILIGHT has been described as "an end-times extraterrestrial vaudeville.""Len Jenkin's dark, whirling comedy, PORT TWILIGHT, follows several storylines as they trail throughout the fantasy city of the title. All of the stories involve what might be called decoding messages and 'alien contact.' ... thanks to Len Jenkin's language, PORT TWILIGHT makes for a haunting, mind-altering experience." -Jerome Weeks, Art & Seek"... PORT TWILIGHT is a distinctly playful and yet somber, introspective piece about the foibles and heartbreak of humanity, and its quest for solutions ... It is one of the most original shows I have ever seen. It combines insouciance, weariness, zeal, cynicism, comic relief, melancholy, the indecipherable into a poetically wistful and radiant experience." -Christopher Soden, Pegasus News"Len Jenkin's zippy, atmospheric dialogue. There's a beautiful lyrical quality to it." -Jonathan Pacheco, Slant Magazine

An elegy for the lost souls in the dying plains of Kansas, 1936, who clung to their blighted homesteads like bees to a poisoned hive."If a poem is a form of dense evocational shorthand, Sally Nemeth's HOLY DAYS is a stage poem. It is uncommonly affecting - an elegy for the lost souls in the dying plains of Kansas, 1936, who clung to their blighted homesteads like bees to the poisoned hive. Not as a matter of choice, but of inevitability. This is The Grapes of Wrath in reverse. There is not much plot. What there is, is simple and stirring ... It is not the action that counts, but the chiseled characters. Nemeth is a miniaturist. Is there a play in this? There is. Amazingly. A majestic and gripping one. There is beauty and wisdom in this little piece." -Sylvie Drake, Los Angeles Times"Set in Kansas during the Dust Bowl, this play tells the story of two farmer brothers and their wives struggling to make it through the drought and winds that hit the southern Great Plains during the 30's, blowing away as much withered hope as dried-out topsoil ... But the play is less about plot than quiet emotion and reflection ... the deep hope Dust Bowlers had to draw upon to carry on." -Monica Eng, Chicago Tribune"The power of this play derives partly from its unerring choice and arrangement of events. It begins, in the aftermath of devastation, focusing exclusively on how the characters cope with disaster, and presenting them in an initial state of shock, so that bits of basic exposition gradually come to light during the action, as they regain strength to face the facts. The whole gesture of the piece is to show the shattered group pulling themselves together and making survival plans; and, crucially, holding on to the ceremonies of everyday life." -Irving Wardle, The Times (London)

PURE SHOCK VALUE centers on the plight of three longtime Hollywood friend - Ethan Johnson, his brother, Tex, and Ethan's girlfriend, Gabby - who are trying their damndest to make a film called Barking Spiders. How low will they go to get the film made?"Think the Hollywood satire has been done to death? Think again. Playwright Matt Pelfrey sets the format's tired tropes of murderous Tinseltown greed among the most desperately delusional of wannabe edgy filmmakers and snarks them up with ever more outrageous sex, gore, movie jokes and violence ... SHOCK pulls off the rare feat of becoming funnier and more acute the more over-the-top it goes." -Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle"Matt Pelfrey's PURE SHOCK VALUE brilliantly updates the scathingly bleak Hollywood satire for a post-Tarantino generation of Silver Lake slackers." -Rob Avila, San Francisco Bay Guardian"You'll laugh, you'll feel terrible for laughing, and you'll laugh some more watching this Grand Guignol send-up of those trying to make it in Tinseltown." -Matt Sussman, San Francisco Flavorpill"Astonishingly witty dialogue and riotous situations." -Kevin Langson, EDGE SF"PURE SHOCK VALUE is a great black comedy." -Richard Connema, Talkin' Broadway

MINGUS TAKES (3) consists of three one-acts: SPEAKER'S HEAD, IF ONLY WE KNEW, and UPTOWN! It is dedicated to Charles Mingus Jr's ingeniousness, his humor and revolutionary spirit, and his great contribution to American classical music more commonly labeled jazz. In SPEAKER'S HEAD, a speaker introduces his concepts on America's "eminent world domain." In IF ONLY WE KNEW, An African immigrant in New York describes how he was shot by police. In UPTOWN!, a drunk tramp named Psyche strikes up a conversation with Opal on the bus. At first she's very wary of him. But gradually Psyche's penetrating insights begin both to unnerve and intrigue her."...there are only a very few dramatists who come immediately to mind when thinking about the major contemporary African American playwrights: Lorraine Hansberry, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Adrienne Kennedy, August Wilson, Ntozake Shange, and Aishah Rahman. Although she has not had the general name recognition of her contemporaries, Aishah Rahman has been widely celebrated for the craft, language, and vision of her plays. Her daring, innovative fusion of form and function has positioned her in the forefront of American women writing for the theater, and in the forefront of those playwrights who expand the limits, refuse the boundaries, and seek new territories in the formal and stylistic properties of drama as a genre and the theater as a medium." -Thadious M Davis, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University

A psychological drama that focuses on three characters - an American Jewish architect, his half-Arab banker wife, and a Moroccan colonel. MOROCCO begins with the ten-day arrest of sophisticated Abril Kempler, a banker working with her architect husband in Fez, Morocco. The ordeal involves a complex game between the Colonel running the jail and the Jewish American architect. Having Abril released from prison does not readily end the nightmare of this incident. After a brief sojourn to Malaga, Spain, Charles Kempler returns to the prison to confront the Colonel on a deeper transgression."Allan Havis's MOROCCO is an absorbing cat-and-mouse game in which one cannot always distinguish the cat from the mouse. Between the scenes and behind the lines, there is far more here than meets the eye ... In what is partly a comedy of menace, Mr Havis artfully weaves a web of suspicion around his three principal characters ... The author repeatedly encourages the audience's sense of wariness. One starts to wonder if the characters are inhabiting a Morocco of the mind, or, perhaps, a sanatorium. Step by step, we are led into Mr Havis's labyrinth. Beneath the surface, the play is concerned with politics and terrorism as well as with the polarities of personalities that can inhabit a marriage ... There are significant pieces studiously missing in Mr Havis's Pinteresque puzzle, a fact that enhances the play's tantalizing air of mystery." -Mel Gussow, The New York Times

Offbeat drama of a mother, father, and adult daughter living together inside an upscale Manhattan apartment. Daughter plays a cello and has a personality disorder. Her alter ego seduces her father who is a political media guru. Mother is conflicted in how to stop this awful charade."The family under observation in Allan Havis's MINK SONATA has affluence and political influence ... [In] this intriguing new play ... the dialog is literate and often amusing. Mr Havis has an ability to make artificial language sound in character. He has captured the jargon of people for whom solipsism may be an incurable disease ..." -Mel Gussow, The New York Times

A tender, quirky play about two white women and a black man living in Seattle in 1992, as the nation and the media are transfixed by the trial of four Los Angeles police officers accused in the beating of Rodney King and the outcry of protest after the verdicts. "... [an] unassuming gem ... A comedy with serious implications, Y York's neatly crafted play explores the impact of preconception and miscommunication upon a Seattle Environmental Protection Agency office worker, her black colleague and her new neighbor, an East Coast visitor researching a book on 'hidden prejudice' in America. The action unfolds in 1992, with the media dominated by the trial of Los Angeles police officers for beating Rodney King and the subsequent riots after the 'not guilty' verdict. Yet while that is the backdrop, the play is so low-key it would be easy to overlook just how much it has to say and how well it says it. Though treating weighty issues, York doesn't clobber you with them, instead maintaining a light touch. While her theme may be familiar, she has found a fresh and individual approach to it. Best of all, by accurately capturing the quirks of human attitudes and interplay, York keeps the play consistently funny, unflaggingly true and, at times, surprisingly touching. The central factor in its success is a memorable protagonist: the unglamorous, opinionated and outspoken Haddie. She's the sort you'd instantly peg as a bit of an oddball, likely a loner: the type who blurts out opinions and random pronouncements; who offers unsolicited advice to strangers at the supermarket ('buy this one, not that'); and who conducts long, heartfelt conversations with a pet fish in a plastic bag. She has taken as her own (and parrots) many notions she heard on T V or read somewhere, without thinking them through. Naturally, a lot of these ideas have a touch of paranoia about the inevitable 'they' who make all the world's trouble. Haddie is eccentric, exasperating, yet so desperate to connect that she's strangely endearing. Despite its early-'90s setting, this astutely observed play's themes are absolutely relevant. York gets exactly the way many people view issues of race and class, how people adopt any overheard opinions that sound reasonable enough, how the 'big story' at any particular moment colors our everyday perceptions. AND L.A. IS BURNING makes you laugh, then leaves you with plenty to ponder and discuss." -Everett Evans, Houston Chronicle

An interrogation tale inspired loosely by the detention of Colombia's Patricia Lara in the mid-1980s. Two INS agents detain and try to break a Latin American journalist and a Brooklyn rabbi - both suspects believed to be involved with terrorist groups. The interrogations go very badly and the tables are turned against one of the INS agents."... To say that HOSPITALITY by Allan Havis betokens an auspicious beginning is an understatement of fairly large dimensions. Nearly everything about this production is first-rate. The script, an interrogation drama which brilliantly defeats the normally static two-characters-and-a-table configuration of the genre, not only is tough and taut, but gratifyingly witty and urbane ..." -Nels Nelson, Philadelphia Daily News"... a trenchant political drama that belies its innocuous title ... An exceptional script ..." -Hari., Variety

A grieving widower must accept his wife's death to save himself and his relationship with his daughter. David loves his wife, Gillian. Unfortunately, she died two years ago. David deals with his grief by continuing his romance with her "ghost" during walks on the beach at night. While David lives in the past, other family problems crop up in the present. Brother and sister-in-law Paul and Esther visit to try to help David's daughter, Rachel. She has lost her mother and needs her father to snap back into the real world for her sake."... Though TO GILLIAN begins as a simple dramatization of its hero's obsessive mourning, it gradually expands to become a richer form of family drama ... [Mr Brady] writes with a rueful sophistication that keeps his story's sentimentality at bay ... TO GILLIAN is peppered with sharp, evenhanded observations about the tenuous ties that connect husbands and wives and parents and children ... if TO GILLIAN is a play that sends a ghost flying out of [the] heavens, its appeal derives from its author's keen sensitivity to life down here on earth." -Frank Rich, The New York Times"This first major work by Michael Brady has well-dimensioned characters, solid conflict, piquant writing and gives off a warm, affirmative glow ... When it has become not uncommon to encounter plays with no sympathetic characters, audiences will respond affectionately to everyone In GILLIAN. Working on a small canvas, the author is in impressive control of his material ..." -Richard Hummler, Variety

UNFINISHED WOMEN deals with the events in a home for unwed mothers on the last day of jazz musician Charlie Parker's life, March 12, 1955. The play digs beyond statistics and sociological theories to find the unarticulated, half-understood longings of teenage mothers."UNFINISHED WOMEN is an underground classic. It reaches beyond statistics and sociological theories to find the unarticulated, half-understood longings of teen-age mothers ... The title implies the central conceit of the play: the juxtaposition of the Hide-A-Wee Home for Unwed Mothers (the unfinished women) and Pasha's boudoir, where Charlie Parker (the 'Bird'), the brilliant black saxophonist of years past, spent his last days. Many types of girls find themselves in this home: the child of middle-class upbringing who got 'caught'; the innocent who was raped; the savvy, street-smart girl who let the music make love to her, as well as the strict nurse who turned her illegitimate child into a 'niece.' Charlie Chan, that stereotype of Oriental inscrutability, presides over all, a comment on the power of images in our society. The play focuses on that moment when the girls must decide whether to keep their babies or to give them up for adoption. Despite their fantasies of rescue by 'caring' young fathers, they must decide alone. Meanwhile, Bird slowly dies in the plush boudoir of his longtime mistress, trapped in a narcotic fog and the lost dreams of his exploited talent." -From Margaret B Wilkerson's introduction to the play in 9 Plays by Black Women