Dan O’Brien: Plays One
This first collection from the multi-award-winning American poet and playwright Dan O’Brien includes the following five plays:
The Body of an American
Two actors embody more than thirty roles in an exhilarating new form of documentary theatre, against a backdrop of some of the world’s most iconic images of war. (Full-length drama / 2 performers, multiple roles.)
The House in Hydesville
At once an exploration of familial abuse and the need for spiritual transcendence, a compelling “true ghost story.” (Full-length drama / 5w, 2m.)
The Cherry Sisters Revisited
The five Cherry sisters’ love of the vaudeville carries them to the bright lights of Broadway. A provocative comedy with music. (Full-length comedy-drama / 5w, 1m.)
The Voyage of the Carcass
Trapped in the ice at the North Pole, only three members of the doomed Carcass crew survive. (Full-length comedy-drama / 1w, 2m.)
The Dear Boy
James Flanagan is not a kind teacher. Is he a good teacher? He likes to think so. The Dear Boy is an intimate and dramatic portrait of a man forced to face his past, his present, and the life he may still yet live. (Full-length drama / 1w, 3m.)
REVIEWS
“Dan O’Brien is a playwright-poet who, like a mash-up of Seamus Heaney and Dashiel Hammett, puts the audience in the middle of an unfolding mystery promising both revelation and terror, and delivering an equal measure of both.”
—Robert Schenkkan
“I run to Dan O’Brien’s plays. With absolute honesty and a poet’s language, play by play, Dan is laying bare the human heart—often his own—trying to understand the heart’s homelessness. With relentless courage, wonderful black humor and intricate narrative, Dan gets us where we most desire to go—intimacy. Dan’s life is proving to be our roadmap home.”
—Bill Cain
“The Body of an American is a marvel in elegant construction. A story full of unexpected twists and turns, it captures the nightmare of war and our attempts to comprehend it via a mass media designed to both condemn and celebrate violence. Dan O’Brien has written a gem of a play.”
—Eric Bogosian