Stone Cold Dead Serious

Publisher Description

A play about fiction's power to both divide and unite, from Pulitzer finalist Adam Rapp In small-town America, a young adult novel about teen pregnancy is banned by the local school board, igniting a fierce and violent debate over abortion, religious beliefs, and modern feminism. Its directionless New York City author arrives in town to defend the book and finds that it has inspired a group of local teens to rebel in strange and unexpected ways. A timely and unforgettable drama about the failure of urban and heartland America to understand each other, The Metal Children explores what happens when fiction becomes a matter of life and death.

The next work for the stage from the Pulitzer finalist Adam Rapp, Essential Self-Defense. In Essential Self-Defense, disgruntled misfit Yul Carroll takes a job as an attack dummy in a women's self-defense class and finds himself mysteriously drawn to Sadie, the repressed bookworm mercilessly honing her skills on him. Meanwhile, all's not well on the unassuming Midwestern streets of Bloggs: with local children vanishing at an alarming rate, our hero, his lady friend, and a motley assortment of poets, butchers, and punk librarians prepare to battle the darkness on the edge of town.

Alternately heartbreaking and starkly humorous, this teenager's brutal story of escape and desire for redemption is masterfully told by award-winning writer and film director Adam Rapp. I'm what they call a Gray Grouper. The Red Groupers are the junkies and the Blue Groupers are the suicide kids. Steve Nugent is in a facility called Burnstone Grove. It's a place for kids who are addicts, like Shannon Lynch, who can stick $1.87 in change up his nose, or for kids who have tried to commit suicide, like Silent Starla, whom Steve is getting a crush on. But Steve doesn't really fit in either group. He used to go to a gifted school. So why is he being held at Burnstone Grove? Keeping a journal, in which he recalls his confused and violent past, Steve is left to figure out who he is by examining who he was.

"Here in this 86th edition of The Best Plays Theater Yearbook are all of the many features that have long distinguished this indispensable reference work on the American theater. What makes the series unique is its unequaled depth and breadth of information on the season under review and its record of the key achievements in theater over a multitude of earlier seasons: detailed listings of all plays produced on and Off Broadway, and hundreds Off Off Broadway, between June 2004 and May 2005; essays by distinguished theater critics and commentators on all 10 of the chosen plays; listings of the longest-running plays and of the winners of the notable theater awards, in many cases ever since those awards were established; and the full membership of the Theater Hall of Fame." "But the scope of this book extends far beyond New York, recognizing as it does the vitality and the innovative contributions of resident theaters throughout the country. The invaluable survey of the season around the United States includes the American Theatre Critics Association's Steinberg New Play Award and Citations, plus a directory of more than 300 new play productions and readings at resident theaters everywhere." "As always this compendious book is illustrated with scores of photographs of productions in New York and around the United States." --Book Jacket.