"Will Eno is an original, a maverick wordsmith whose weird, wry dramas gurgle with the grim humor and pain of life."—Guardian A moving and funny new play exploring the universe of a small American town. As a friendship develops between longtime resident John Dodge and new arrival Mary Swanson, the lives of the inhabitants of Middletown intersect in strange and poignant ways in a journey that takes them from the local library to outer space and points between.
“The marvel of Mr. Eno’s new version is how closely it tracks the original while also being, at every moment and unmistakably, a Will Eno play. After climbing the craggy peaks of Ibsen’s daunting play, Mr. Eno has brought down from its dizzying heights a surprising crowd-pleasing (if still strange) work.” — Charles Isherwood, New York Times “Gnit is classic Will Eno. By that I mean I was thrilled by it.” — Kris Vire, TimeOut Chicago “If ever a play made me want to be a better person, this is it.” — Bob Fischbach, Omaha World-Herald Peter Gnit, a funny enough, but so-so specimen of humanity, makes a lifetime of bad decisions on the search for his True Self. This is a rollicking yet cautionary tale about (among other things) how the opposite of love is laziness. Gnit is a faithful, unfaithful and willfully American misreading of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (a nineteenth-century Norwegian play), written by Will Eno, who has never been to Norway. Will Eno’s most recent plays include The Open House (Signature Theatre, New York, 2014; Obie Award, Lucille Lortel Award for Best Play) and The Realistic Joneses (Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, 2012; Broadway, 2014). His play Middletown received the Horton Foote Prize and Thom Pain (based on nothing) was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Eno lives Brooklyn.
At an elite East Coast university, an ambitious young black student and her esteemed white professor meet to discuss a paper the college junior is writing about the American Revolution. They're both liberal. They're both women. They're both brilliant. But very quickly, discussions of grammar and Google turn to race and reputation, and before they know it, they're in dangerous territory neither of them had foreseen – and facing stunning implications that can't be undone.
Mary Swanson just moved to Middletown. About to have her first child, she is eager to enjoy the neighbourly bonds a small town promises. But life in Middletown is complicated: neighbors are near strangers and moments of connection are fleeting. Middletown is a playful, poignant portrait of a town with two lives, one ordinary and visible, the other epic and mysterious. Middletown was awarded the prestigious Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play in 2010. “The strange beauty of life and its sometimes unbearable weight are both considered with a screwball lyricism... pitch-perfect... delicate, moving and wry” - New York Times
From Plato to Freud to ecocriticism, the book illustrates dozens of stimulating-and sometimes notoriously complex-perspectives for approaching literature and film. The book offers authoritative, clear, and easy-to-follow explanations of theories that range from established classics to the controversies of current theory. Each chapter offers a conversational, step-by-step explanation of a single theory, critic, or issue, accompanied by concrete examples for applying the concepts and engaging suggestions for related literary readings. Following a section on the foundations of literary theory, the book is organized thematically, with an eye to the best way to develop a real, working understanding of the various theories. Cross-references are particularly important, since it's through the interaction of examples that readers most effectively advance from basic topics and arguments to some of the more specialized and complicated issues. Each chapter is designed to tell a complete story, yet also to reach out to other chapters for development and debate. Literary theorists are hardly unified in their views, and this book reflects the various traditions, agreements, influences, and squabbles that are a part of the field. Special features include hundreds of references to and quotations from novels, stories, plays, poems, movies, and other media. Online resources could also include video and music clips, as well as high-quality examples of visual art mentioned in the book. The book also includes periodic "running" references to selected key titles (such as Frankenstein) in order to illustrate the effect of different theories on a single work.
“Mr. Eno has established himself as one of the most vital, distinctive voices in the American theater over the past decade. Once encountered, his style is not likely to be forgotten: Wryly humorous and deeply engaged in the odd kinks and quirks of language and its fuzzy relationship to meaning, his plays are also infused with a haunted awareness of, and a sorrowful compassion for, the fundamental solitude of existence.” –New York Times “An anarchic and deliciously clever play.” –Huffington Post This wildly funny and subversive take on the archetypal family drama is dense with authentic feeling and pain and it ultimately evolves into something haunted and mysterious and grand, even hopeful. The Open House won a Drama Desk Award, the 2014 Obie Award for Playwriting and the 2014 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play. It was on the Top Ten Plays of 2014 lists of TIME magazine, Time Out New York and the NY Daily News. Will Eno is the author of The Realistic Joneses and Thom Pain (based on nothing) , which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Other works include Middletown, The Flu Season, Tragedy: a tragedy, Intermission and Gnit. He is a Residency Five Fellow at Signature Theatre in New York. His many awards include the PEN/Laura Pels Award, the Horton Foote Prize and the first-ever Marian Seldes/Garson Kanin Fellowship by the Theater Hall of Fame.
"Caryl Churchill is a dramatist who must surely be amongst the best half-dozen now writing? a playwright of genuine audacity and assurance, able to use her considerable wit and intelligence in ways at once unusual, resonant and dramatically riveting."?Benedict Nightingale From Love and Information: SEX What sex evolved to do is get information from two sets of genes so you get offspring that's not identical to you. Otherwise you just keep getting the same thing over and over again like hydra or starfish. So sex essentially is information. You dont think that while we're doing it do you? It doesn't hurt to know it. Information and also love. If you're lucky. In this fast-moving kaleidoscope, more than one hundred characters try to make sense of what they know. Declared "the greatest living English playwright" by Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill will premiere this latest work at London's Royal Court in fall 2012. Caryl Churchill is one of the most influential playwrights of our time. She is the author of more than twenty plays, including Seven Jewish Children, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, Top Girls, This is a Chair, Far Away, A Number, Cloud Nine, and Serious Money.
"[A] tender, funny, terrific new play. . . . Mr. Eno's voice, which teases out the poetry in the pedestrian and finds glinting humor in the static that infuses our faltering efforts to communicate, is as distinctive as any American playwright's today."—The New York Times "Weird and wonderful . . . Eno's familiar sudden-shifting between profound and playful verbiage is delightfully disarming and sometimes awfully funny."—Variety “Plays as funny and moving, as wonderful and weird as The Realistic Joneses… do not appear often on Broadway. Or ever, really…. Mr. Eno’s voice may be the most singular of his generation, but it’s humane, literate and slyly hilarious…. For all the sadness woven into its fabric, The Realistic Joneses brought me a pleasurable rush virtually unmatched by anything I’ve seen this season.” – The New York Times “As usual, Eno’s dialogue is a marvel of compression and tonal control, trivial chitchat flipping into cosmic profundity with striking ease…. There’s much to savor: the dry but meaningful banter, the joy of humans sharing time and space, battling the darkness with a joke or silence. Life in Enoland isn’t what you’d call realistic—it’s more real than that.” – Time Out New York “[An] elliptical, funny, dark and strangely moving new play…. Eno is a writer with heart and compassion.” – Chicago Tribune “Eno's first-ever commercial foray ups the creative ante in a Broadway climate that can be resistant to new voices…. [A] very fine play where laughter exists a heartbeat, or heartbreak, away from tears.” – The Telegraph Meet Bob and Jennifer and their new neighbors John and Pony, two suburban couples who have more in common than their identical last names. Boasting the playwright's quintessential existential quirkiness, this new comedy finds poetry in the banal while humorously exploring our ever-floundering efforts at communication. Listed as one of New York Times's Best Plays of 2012, The Realistic Joneses received its Broadway premiere in spring 2014, starring Toni Collete, Michael C. Hall, Tracy Letts and Marisa Tomei, and opening to rave reviews. Will Eno is the author of Thom Pain (based on nothing), which ran for a year Off-Broadway and was a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Other works include Middletown, The Flu Season, Tragedy: a tragedy, Intermission, and Gnit, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. His many awards include the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theatre Award, the Horton Foote Prize, and the first-ever Marian Seldes/Garson Kanin Fellowship by the Theater Hall of Fame.
The Methuen Drama Book of New American Plays is an anthology of six outstanding plays from some of the most exciting playwrights currently receiving critical acclaim in the States. It showcases work produced at a number of the leading theatres during the last decade and charts something of the extraordinary range of current playwriting in America. It will be invaluable not only to readers and theatergoers in the U.S., but to those around the world seeking out new American plays and an insight into how U.S. playwrights are engaging with their current social and political environment. There is a rich collection of distinctive, diverse voices at work in the contemporary American theatre and this brings together six of the best, with work by David Adjmi, Marcus Gardley, Young Jean Lee, Katori Hall, Christopher Shinn and Dan LeFranc. The featured plays range from the intimate to the epic, the personal to the national and taken together explore a variety of cultural perspectives on life in America. The first play, David Adjmi's Stunning, is an excavation of ruptured identity set in modern day Midwood, Brooklyn, in the heart of the insular Syrian-Jewish community; Marcus Gardley's lyrical epic The Road Weeps, The Well Runs Dry deals with the migration of Black Seminoles, is set in mid-1800s Oklahoma and speaks directly to modern spirituality, relocation and cultural history; Young Jean Lee's Pullman, WA deals with self-hatred and the self-help culture in her formally inventive three-character play; Katori Hall's Hurt Village uses the real housing project of "Hurt Village" as a potent allegory for urban neglect set against the backdrop of the Iraq war; Christopher Shinn's Dying City melds the personal and political in a theatrical crucible that cracks open our response to 9/11 and Abu Graib, and finally Dan LeFranc's The Big Meal, an inter-generational play spanning eighty years, is set in the mid-west in a generic restaurant and considers family legacy and how some of the smallest events in life turn out to be the most significant.
