"Mary Page Marlowe leads an unremarkable life. As an accountant in Ohio with two children, few would expect her life to be inordinately intricate or moving. However, it is choices, both mundane and gripping, and where those choices have taken Mary Page Marlowe that make her life so intimate and surprisingly complicated. From Pulitzer-and Tony-winning playwright Tracy Letts comes a piece about the fragility of a moment and its effects on one's identity."--Back cover.
Encouraged by his minister, Ken decides to find himself and his faith by impulsively flying to London, where he navigates the new and somewhat dangerous realm of British counterculture. Tracy Letts's play dares to ask the big questions, revealing the hidden yearning and emotion that can spur eccentric behaviour in outwardly conventional people."--BOOK JACKET.
“Letts is a master of pitch-dark comedies that measure the grisliest depths of human behavior…Linda Vista is very funny, equally unsettling…An inspired, ruthless take on the classic midlife-crisis comedy.” —Ben Brantley, New York Times Fifty-year-old Wheeler is moving into his own apartment after a nasty divorce. With a blend of humor and humanity, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Tracy Letts demonstrates the ultimate midlife crisis: the bewildering search for self-discovery once you’ve already grown up.
Warning: What you're about to read is not a romance . . . Diabolical Wall Street traders, Dane Russ and Val Montgomery, vaulted into fame and fortune as the power duo of financial technology. But after they lost the internet trading company they built from the ground up to ruthless Geraldo Valencia, they had to tuck tail and run to a Midwestern firm. Dane deals with the boredom by leaning into his playboy ways. Meanwhile Val plays the role of a scrupulous mentor, while secretly playing mind games with everyone at the office. When Geraldo's daughter shows up as an intern in Val's summer training program, Val sees the perfect opportunity for her longed-for revenge--she'll teach the girl nefarious business practices and send her home ethically compromised. But Dane's not interested because he's stumbled across his own opportunity for vengeance--a chance to seduce Noelle, the new CEO, and the woman who spurned him years ago. As Val and Dane play cat-and-mouse with everyone else, their long-simmering history of unresolved romantic injuries with one another begins to burn beyond their control. While Dane doesn't notice that a jealous Val has set him on a path to ruin Noelle, Val's blind to the traps Dane has laid to bring her down. Although they're adept at using everyone around them like chess pieces, their interpersonal game has no rules and can only end with their mutual destruction. If they don't agree to a cease fire, Val's reputation will be destroyed and Dane will lose his heart before he even realizes he's risked it.
“A deeply moving new play from Tracy Letts.” —Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune Known for his complex portrayals of the human psyche, Tracy Letts expands what at first appears to be an intimate snapshot of one woman’s ordinary life into a grand and elaborate portrait play. In a series of elegant, nonchronological scenes spanning the years from 1946 to 2015, the play hopscotches through Mary Page Marlowe’s quiet existence as an accountant from Ohio—complicating notions of what it means to lead a “simple life.”
THE STORY: Arthur Przybyszewski owns a decrepit donut shop in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. Franco Wicks, a black teenager who is his only employee, wants to change the shop for the better. This comedy-drama by Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-w
"Don't believe anything they say." Those were the last words Alice's older sister, Annie, said to her before she turned her back on their parents and left home forever. Alice spent four years waiting and wondering when the impossibly glamorous sister she idolized would return to her--and what her Hollywood-insider parents had done to drive her away. Now it's 1948 and Alice isn't a kid anymore. When she gets the phone call from the hospital, she knows it's up to her to help Annie, in a coma after being beaten and left for dead in MacArthur Park. The search for Annie's attacker leads Alice into a dark and dangerous world of tough-talking private eyes, psychopathic movie stars, and troubled starlets--and onto the trail of a young runaway who is the sole witness to an unspeakable crime. What this girl knows could shut down a criminal syndicate and put Annie's attacker behind bars--if Alice can find her first. And she isn't the only one looking. Debut novelist Mary McCoy evokes the dangerous glamour of Hollywood's Golden Age, a corrupt world where the people who live in the nicest houses have the dirtiest secrets and no drive into the sunset can erase the crimes of past.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in drama as well as Tony Awards for best play and best actor, Tracy Letts has emerged as one of the greatest playwrights of the twenty-first century. Understanding Tracy Letts, the first book dedicated to his writing, is an introduction to his plays and an invitation to engage more deeply with his work—both for its emotional power and cultural commentary. Experiencing a Tracy Letts play often feels akin to reading a Cormac McCarthy novel, watching a Cohen Brothers film, and seeing an episode of Breaking Bad at the same time. His characters can be ruthlessly cruel and funny, selfish and generous, delusional and incisive, and deceptive and painfully honest. They keep secrets. They harbor biases and misconceptions. And in their quest to find love and understanding, they often end up being the greatest impediments to their own happiness. As a writer, Letts can move seamlessly from the milieu of a Texas trailer park to the pulsating nightlife of London's countercultural scene, the stifling quiet of small-town Ohio to the racial tensions of urban Chicago. He thrives in the one-act format, in plays like Mary Page Marlow and The Minutes, as well as the epic scope of August: Osage County and Linda Vista. With a musician's sense of timing, Letts shifts between humor and heartache, silence and sound, and the mundane and the poetic. And he fearlessly tackles issues such as gender bias, racism, homophobia, and disability rights. Contemporary American life thus becomes a way to comment on the country's troubled history from Native American genocide to the civil rights movement. The personal narratives of his characters become gateways to the political. Understanding Tracy Letts celebrates the range of Letts's writing, in part, by applying different critical approaches to his works. Whether through the lens of disability studies, the conspiracy genre, food studies, the feminist politics of quilting, or masculinity studies, these readings help bring out the thematic richness and sociopolitical dimensions of Letts's work.
"One of the best American plays of the past quarter century." - Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal "An immensely entertaining pop artifact. Written with neon-lit flamboyance." - Vincent Canby, New York Times "A brilliant play. A major theatrical event." - Michael Billington, Guardian “A visceral theatre experience of the highest order. For those who like their theatre strong, not tepid, it's immensely gratifying.” –Backstage The Smith family hatch a plan to murder their estranged matriarch for her insurance money and hire Killer Joe Cooper, a police detective and part-time contract killer, to do the job. Once he enters the trailer, their simple plan spirals out of control. Letts’s unforgettable first play is “a tense, gut-twisting thriller ride” and has been performed in fifteen countries in twelve languages (Chicago Tribune). The film adaptation, released in 2011 and starring Matthew McConaghey, is “written with merciless black humor…one hell of a movie” (Roger Ebert). Tracy Letts was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play for August: Osage County, which premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2007 before playing Broadway, London's National Theatre, and a forty-week US tour. Other plays include Pulitzer Prize finalist Man from Nebraska; Killer Joe, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed film; and Bug, which has played in New York, Chicago, and London and was adapted into a film. Letts is an ensemble member of Steppenwolf Theatre Company and garnered a Tony Award for his performance in the Broadway revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
This dark comedy takes place in a seedy motel room outside Oklahoma City, where Agnes, a drug-addled cocktail waitress, is hiding from her ex-con ex-husband. Her lesbian biker friend R.C. introduces her to Peter, a handsome drifter who might be an AWOL Gulf War veteran. They soon begin a relationship that takes place almost entirely within the increasingly claustrophobic confines of her motel room. Peter begins to rant about the war in Iraq, UFOs, the Oklahoma City bombings, cult suicides, and then secret government experiment on soldiers, of which he believes he is a victim. His delusions infect Agnes and the tension mounts as mysterious strangers appear at their door, past events haunt them at every turn and they are attacked by real bugs. Tracy Letts's tale of love, paranoia, and government conspiracy is a thought-provoking psycho-thriller that mixes terror and laughter at a fever pitch.
