Dying City

by Christopher Shinn

Overview

"A stunning drama about life in the shadow of September 11th and the Iraq war."--Time

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781559366571
Publisher:	Theatre Communications Group
Publication date:	12/01/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	844,423
File size:	219 KB

About the Author

Christopher Shinn was born in Hartford, CT and lives in New York. His plays include "Where Do We Live," "Other People," "What Didn't Happen" and "On the Mountain." His work has been produced around the world. He is a winner of an OBIE in Playwriting and the Robert S. Chesney Award. He teaches playwriting at the New School.

Editorial Reviews

The finest new American play I've seen in a long while...DYING CITY is a political play and also a psychodrama about what Arthur Miller called the politics of the soul. It's about public conscience and private grief, and real and symbolic catastrophes.

NY Observer

Anyone who doubts that Mr. Shinn is among the most provocative and probing of American playwrights today need only experience the creepy, sophisticated welding of form and content that is DYING CITY. Anyone who has followed the career of Mr. Shinn, who is in his early thirties, knows that he uses tidy dramatic formulas the better to frame the defiant messiness of human lives. He hooks you with tantalizing exposition—and the lure of a wham-bang solution—and then leaves you alone with your racing mind in a forest of ambiguities. On one level DYING CITY is as satisfyingly spooky, crisp and corny as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. But in answering the plot's whodunit-type questions, it spawns a wriggling host of other, deeper questions that stay with you into the night...Unlike so many contemporary plays DYING CITY raises obvious, important issues in any-thing but obvious ways.

NY Times

Trying to make sense of what is left behind envelops DYING CITY, Christopher Shinn's remarkable tale of loss and how two very different people handle their grief. The play is personal, intimate even, yet its themes could not be more all-encompassing and its emotional impact more affecting...In this subtle and revealing play, Shinn is able to take the political and humanize it—transforming the stuff of daily news stories into a devastating statement on the unforeseen and often hidden consequences of war.

A.P.