Craig Lucas – författare

Here is a modern American tragedy about a grieving screenwriter who compromises his ideals to make a small fortune that enables him to climb from invisible poverty into the rarefied seductions and surreal beauty of the Hollywood Hills. Robert's gay lover endured horrific and protracted suffering before Robert helped him to die. Robert's subsequent struggle to come to grips with his own incomprehensible survival and his deep need to find a place in the world that doesn't burn push him into a lush and intoxicating world of sexual ecstacy and intrigue, even as he privately delves into the techniques and teachings of Buddhism for some footing, no matter how tenuous. With breathtaking speed, Robert is caught in a love triangle with a powerful, ruthless and rapacious film producer and his fascinating but woefully under stimulated wife. The lies that Robert perpetrates become inextricably interwoven with theirs each person lying to themselves as much as to their partners and the ones they are betraying. Killingly funny and heart stoppingly elegiac, this play is a thrilling dramatic experience.

Drama Characters: 3 male, 3 female Set Requirement: Simple Prayer for my Enemy was produced Off-Broadway as part of the 2008-2009 Season at Playwrights Horizons. In Prayer for my Enemy, two middle-class families in suburban New York State confront their private demons against the public backdrop of the American incursion into Iraq. As their paths cross in ways that are both comic and terrifying, lies and secrets are at last exposed and an honest, hard-earned redemption is achieved for both. "A newly-minted classic." -The New York Times "Craig Lucas's Prayer for My Enemy is a game of hide-and-seek, in which the command of Lucas's writing works as a kind of unspoken promise to the audience: in this series of opaque, impressionistic moments in one family's turmoil, something will be found. The apparent 'enemy' of the title is the bumbling, bombastic Austin Noone, a bipolar Vietnam vet, whose mania has held his family hostage for decades and seems finally to be in abeyance. 'I thank God every day, I hit my knees first and last thing, for this second chance,' Austin, who's in A.A. and six years sober, says. 'I didn't deserve it, but...'The rueful voice of his daughter, Marianne, chimes in. 'We did,' she says.' Prayer for My Enemy ends with an elegiac hymn to devotion, but the play dramatizes a far less comforting thought, one that Austin articulates from his coma. 'Hell is truth seen too late,' he says."-John Lahr, The New Yorker

Am lie is an extraordinary young woman who lives quietly in the world but loudly in her mind. She covertly improvises small but surprising acts of kindness that bring joy and mayhem. But when a chance at love comes her way, Am lie realizes that to find happiness she'll have to risk everything and say what's in her heart. Be inspired by this imaginative dreamer who finds her voice, discovers the power of connection, and sees possibility around every corner.