The Breach
Love has no limits for the Diggs siblings: there’s nothing that seventeen-year-old Jude won’t do to keep her younger brother Acton safe. Growing up in the turbulence of 1970s America, Jude works nights and weekends to pay the bills, just so that they can stay together with their mother. But when Acton’s troublesome pals form a club in their basement, a foolish game threatens to upend Jude’s plans and derail their lives forever. Jude will do anything to protect her brother, but someone may have to pay the price.
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“Wallace’s excellent, riveting play is an absorbing story of love, lust and loyalty.”
“A gripping examination of inequality and consent.”
“A poetic and deeply tender look at love, family and friendship.”
One Flea Spare
One Flea Spare is set in plague-ravaged 17th-century London, where a wealthy couple is preparing to flee their home when a mysterious sailor and a young girl appear sneaking into their boarded up house. Now, quarantined together for 28 days, the only thing these strangers fear more than the Plague is each other. Definitions of morality are up for grabs and survival takes many forms in this dark, fiercely intense & humorous play.
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“I sat in a theater at the Humana Festival last year, after the closing monologue of ONE FLEA SPARE, unable to move. Nothing had prepared me — not my admiration for her plays and for her beautiful, harsh, moving, brilliantly political poetry — for the experience of watching this play, which is in my opinion one of the finest works of dramatic literature written here or in England in the last two decades. Everyone who loves the theater should read this play. It has made me INTENSELY envious and very full of joy.”
“Naomi Wallace sharply tightens her focus in this latest, thrillingly original work, set for the most part in a virtually bare London room during the Great Plague.”
“Beautiful writing....a rare experience...a show you should see”
Things of Dry Hours
In Depression-era Alabama, black Sunday school teacher and Communist Party member Tice Hogan lives on the edge of trouble.When a white factory worker on the run demands sanctuary, Tice and his daughter Cali may be pushed over that edge.
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“Extraordinarily powerful, it is a privilege to attend such a theatrically excellent event.”
“THINGS OF DRY HOURS is a beautiful, brave and devastating play, a profound imaginative delving into radical resistance and hope rising at an impossible moment, in crushingly inhospitable circumstances. No one writes about politics, history and all that’s hidden underneath better than Naomi Wallace. Ferocious, tender, whimsical, tough, brutally direct, poetically elusive, her voice is utterly unique and essential. I’m grateful, as always, for her unsparing, painful, sexy stirring up of our human selves.”
“Naomi Wallace’s gorgeously written and philosophically rich celebration of a black Communist agitator in the Depression-era South … Wallace weaves together these proud, lonely souls with language rich in metaphor and, at times, as hard and piercing as a handful of nails.”
“Naomi Wallace’s fierce new play tackles the plight of black communists in America … Naomi Wallace is a dangerous woman … not only in her writing … but also in her personal stand against what she sees as injustice and the peeling away of democratic rights.”
And I and Silence
Two imprisoned young women, one African American and the other white, form a perilous bond. As they serve time they forge a plan for survival. They practice hard. If they don’t get it right they’ll lose everything: the outside world is even more dangerous to their friendship than the jail itself. And I and Silence explores the fierce dreams of youth and the brutal reality of adulthood in 1950’s segregated America.
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“Unmissable … a truly American tragedy. Wallace’s devastating, moving play is entirely without extravagance and artifice and is completely grounded in the harshness of the real world.”
“Naomi Wallace’s short, painful prison drama uses the backdrop of racially segregated ’50s America to weave a tale of the hope that can blossom behind bars, and the despair that can destroy a life outside them.”
“In just 75 minutes on a tiny, almost bare stage, playwright Naomi Wallace conjures a compelling picture of friendship against the odds in the segregated America of the Fifties.”
“AND I AND SILENCE is a play that takes on big themes in a very small way and has the ability to be both powerful and touching, leading to an unforgettable dénouement.”
The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek
High atop a railroad trestle that spans a bone dry creek, two teenagers plan to race across the bridge against an oncoming locomotive. At first their scheme adds excitement to life in a small factory town during the Great Depression, then sensual experience awakens dangerous passions in an era of stifled ambitions. With muscular poetry and prophetic drive, Naomi Wallace delves into a world where people struggle to change lives that bear down hard upon them.
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“… Naomi Wallace’s strikingly poetic Depression-era play … By the end, the play, like that train, has built up a full head of steam and we feel its power.”
“… TRESTLE is an often poignant, nonlinear-narrative coming-of-age story that’s set in 1936 in a ‘town outside a city, somewhere in the United States … TRESTLE is at once charming and haunting … you’ll view it with wonder along the way.”
The War Boys
In their spare time three vigilantes, childhood friends, enjoy patrolling the U.S./Mexican border. But these youths soon learn that even the most guarded borders are permeable. When the lines between fantasy and reality become dangerously blurred, these young men are forced to decide what it means to be an American, and who has the right to belong.
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“THE WAR BOYS, a vital three hander about the informal policing of the Mexican border in Texas by racially screwed-up, sadistic vigilantes.”
“… a violent and often beautifully written story about three young Texan men who have hired themselves out to catch ‘wetbacks’ …”
In the Heart of America
Appalachian-born Craver and Palestinian-American Remzi bond in a way characteristic of soldiers, but their relationship soon becomes something far deeper and dangerous in Naomi Wallace's exploration of war, love and the possibility of desire to change us at our core.
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“IN THE HEART OF AMERICA is a pretty startling piece of writing. It has the driving political anger and entwining of the personal and political that marked some of the best British writing of the early seventies, the vigour and mystical overtones of raw Sam Shepard, and the grace and sensuality of a poet …”
Slaughter City
Mixing reality and dream, the radical and the mystic, SLAUGHTER CITY is a searing drama about life in the meat-packing industry.
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“Naomi Wallace’s SLAUGHTER CITY... is a strange and compelling play that unties two elements in the American tradition — the radical and the mystic. If it reminds me of anyone it is the Walt Whitman who wrote of ‘the audacity of freedom’ and the need for America to free itself from the anti-democratic European past. On the radical level, the play is a passionate protest against exploitation ….”
No Such Cold Thing
In this lyrical, searing one-act, an American soldier has an unexpected encounter with two Afghan sisters who are ready to embark on a new life. Their fates — and his — become entangled as the lines between their divergent realities become dangerously blurred.
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“NO SUCH COLD THING unsettles the ground beneath our feet much as [Wallace’s] characters have found it vanishing beneath their own. The characters are pitched, dreamlike, somewhere between life and death as Wallace expertly pinpoints the reality of war in the magical-surreal of dramatic imagination.”
“In their existential disorientation, Wallace’s Middle East plays escape the logic, the prison and the sentimental clichés of a realistic and more sociable theatre, because their impatient narratives take shape only to disintegrate, their dramatic value heightened by the instability of the drama itself.”
Night is a Room
Liana and Marcus have a marriage others envy. Doré has grown accustomed to an isolated existence in her modest flat. After a surprise reunion on Marcus’s 40th birthday, their worlds are shattered by an unexpected turn of events. NIGHT IS A ROOM is a searing exploration of love’s power to both ruin and remake our lives.
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“One of the more audacious jaw-droppers in recent memory … strange and surprising … This is a play sticky with bodily fluids. Carnality is at its core.”
“Wallace writes with a kind of ecstatic lyricism.”
Twenty One Positions: A Cartographic Dream of the Middle East
When Fawaz, a young Palestinian-American, travels to Israel and the Occupied West Bank for the wedding of his estranged brother, he finds only Hala, his fiery fiancée, abandoned at the altar. Amidst the rumors and suspicions surrounding his brother’s mysterious disappearance, Fawaz sets out on a dangerous quest through the militarized landscape of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories to find his brother at whatever cost. Boldly political and humorously provocative, TWENTY ONE POSITIONS is an odyssey for our time.
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“TWENTY ONE POSITIONS brilliantly explores the issues of the Wall separating Israelis and Palestinians and opens a dialogue of immense political and religious importance through a theatrical lens. It imagines a reality in which both sides learn to see one another. It is indeed a ‘cartographic dream of the Middle East.”
“Abusrour, Schlesinger, and Wallace have written a brilliant, unsettling, searing, tragicomedy about the meaning and consequences of violent dispossession and military occupation on generations of human beings.”
“The breathtaking playwriting talents of Palestinian Abdelfattah Abusrour and American Lisa Schlesinger were brought together by Obie and MacArthur winner Naomi Wallace to collaborate on a piece that strikingly demonstrates the absurd of the real. Its dazzling irony at once delicious and devastating, this play will haunt in the way truth should: putting bang, bang in our sleep.”
The Liquid Plain
On the docks of late 18th-century Rhode Island, two runaway slaves, Adjua and Dembi, plan a desperate and daring run to freedom. When a chance encounter triggers an unexpected collision of worlds, painful truths are uncovered, and the brutality of past crimes spills into the next generation.
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“American theater needs more plays like Naomi Wallace’s THE LIQUID PLAIN — by which I mean works that are historical, epic and poetic.”
“A powerful, cathartic reminder that true freedom always starts in the soul and proceeds outward, transforming — and exalting — everything in its path.”
“Elegant … Wallace is as much a poet as she is a playwright.”
“Better than any work of formal history, “The Liquid Plain” captures what historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker call the “Revolutionary Atlantic,” the kidnapped Africans escaping bondage, the sailors resisting impressment, the laboring women fighting concubinage, the masters and owners and managers wrestling with their own dehumanization. Naomi tells this story in rich, vibrant colors… while completely destroying the myth that slavery created “slaves.” She grasped immediately what most historians have yet to understand—that slaves only existed in the white imagination, and that Africans refused to become slaves.”
The Hard Weather Boating Party
As a poisoned city disintegrates around them, three men, almost strangers, meet in a Louisville hotel room to plan an ugly crime against Rubbertown’s most powerful industry.
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“Wallace is one of the most subtle and politically engaged American playwrights of her generation”
The Fever Chart
Subtitled “Three Short Visions of the Middle East,” this collection includes three thematically related short plays, A STATE OF INNOCENCE, THE RETREATING WORLD, and BETWEEN THIS BREATH AND YOU, collectively entitled THE FEVER CHART. Vision One, A STATE OF INNOCENCE, is set in Rafah, Palestine, and features a Palestinian woman, an Israeli architect, and an Israeli soldier. Vision Two, THE RETREATING WORLD, concerns an Iraqi bird keeper from Baghdad and his address before the International Pigeon Convention. Vision Three, BETWEEN THIS BREATH AND YOU, takes place after hours in the waiting room of a clinic in West Jerusalem, where a Palestinian father confronts a nurse’s aide, a young Israeli woman, about the meaning of the loss of his son and the impact it had on her life. These multifaceted works explore the urgency and complexity of the Middle East’s political landscape through the voices and bodies of the people who inhabit it.
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“Real political theater as I understand it: challenging, disorienting, and thought provoking.”
“Extraordinarily powerful, it is a privilege to attend such a theatrically excellent event.”
“Wallace refuses to judge her characters, choosing instead to explore the possibility of humanity in the most inhumane conditions. THE FEVER CHART is the best theatrical production of the year.”
The Girl Who Fell Through a Hole in Her Sweater
In this witty adventure for young audiences by MacArthur “genius” award winner Naomi Wallace, a young girl called Noil finds herself in a strange new place, and must accomplish three and a half magical tasks before she can return home. Noil is clever and resourceful, and with some assistance from a singing narrator and a talking roach, she emerges from the hole in her sweater in time for breakfast.
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Birdy
When the childhood friendship of two young men is damaged by war, they must struggle to save themselves in a world that no longer has use for them. BIRDY tells the story of these two young men in the years before World War II, and later as returning soldiers. Both of them searching for the bond in their past that just might keep them alive.
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“Friendship takes flight in this superb play”
“A timeless story of war and friendship...that plays out on the battlefield of an intense, intimate friendship, where the psychological wounds are more damaging and enduring than the physical ones.”
In the Heart of America and Other Plays
Naomi Wallace's plays speak the underside of life. Her characters suffer and survive against the enormous weight of the times with a dignity that inspires. Her work challenges the audience and reader to reexamine the conflicts and meaning of our everyday lives through her singular, poetic imagery and language.
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The Theatre of Naomi Wallace
Naomi Wallace, an American playwright based in Britain, is one of the more original and provocative voices in contemporary theatre. Her poetic, erotically-charged, and politically engaged plays have been seen in London's West End, off-Broadway, at the Comédie-Française, in regional and provincial theaters, and on college campuses around the world. Known for their intimate, sensual encounters examining the relationship between identity and power, Wallace's works have attracted a wide range of theatre practitioners, including such important directors as Dominic Dromgoole, Ron Daniels, Jo Bonney, and Kwame Kwei-Armah. Drawing on scholars, activists, historians, and theatre artists in the United States, Canada, Britain, and the Middle East, this anthology of essays presents a comprehensive overview of Wallace's body of work that will be of use to theatre practitioners, students, scholars, and educators alike.
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Double Exposure: Plays of the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas
A groundbreaking anthology of plays about the Israel-Palestine conflict penned by diaspora playwrights of Jewish and Palestinian decent. This volume of seven plays varies in genre between drama and comedy, in aesthetic between realism and surrealism, and in setting between the diasporas and Israel/Palestine, offering distinct perspectives that turn the political into the personal.
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Inside/Outside Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora
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“Inside/Outside is an important addition to the dramatic theatre canon... It boldly declares that there is such a thing as a Palestinian playwright and that Palestinianness can be claimed no matter where playwrights were born or in which language they write...”
“These plays are a cosmos of mindscapes, vast and varied in beauty, theme, style and form... And despite their multiplicity in accents, cultures and nationalities, they have an unyielding collective voice.””