Dying City

by Christopher Shinn

";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.";?The New York Observer";Anyone who doubts that Mr. Shinn is among the most provocative and probing of American playwrights today need only experience the . . . sophisticated welding of form and content that is Dying City.";?The New York TimesIn Christopher Shinn’s new play Dying City, a young therapist, Kelly, whose husband Craig was killed while on military duty in Iraq, is confronted a year later by his identical twin Peter, who suspects that Craig’s death was not accidental. Set in a spare downtown-Manhattan apartment after dark, scenes shift from the confrontation between Peter and Kelly, to Kelly’s complicated farewell w

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Fiction

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Christopher Shinn is the author of Dying City (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Where Do We Live (Obie in Playwriting), Now or Later (Evening Standard Theater Award for Best Play shortlist), and Four. Most recently, his play Against premiered at the Almeida Theatre and his adaptation of Ödön von Horváth's Judgment Day premiered at Park Avenue Armory. Of his thirteen original plays, over half had their world premiere in England, with five at the Royal Court. Fellowships include the Guggenheim (2005), the Radcliffe (2019), and the Cullman (2020). His plays are published by Methuen and he teaches playwriting at the New School.

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actual Rating: 3.5/5

This play has really great ideas and execution. I loved the contrasting timelines and the minimal writing style. It could use some more cohesive writing, though. It felt lacking in terms of the dialogue, but I enjoyed it a lot.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love theatre and plays but sometimes it's hard to read and get a picture of what the production might look like. I read this one because I'm interested in the writer and the production is being staged locally next month. I don't really get the point of the story though at all. I am missing something or it's not there.

[Chambers Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

I waited a long time to read the plays of Christopher Shinn. I read rave review after rave review of his plays but still I didn't read any. Why? Because every review contained the same word....'minimal'.
I like expansive works. Angels in America, Streetcar, Death of a Salesman.
I don't like minimal art. And I thought I didn't like minimal plays.
But recently I gave myself the assignment to read a play from all of the hot contemporary playwright. Which meant it was time to read Shinn.
Well let me say this....I was blown away by Dying City.
Surprising. Emotional. Theatrical.
I loved it.
So now I'm going to stop my assignment for a bit.
And read the collected plays of Christopher Shinn.

[Si Squires-Kasten · Rating 2 out of 5]

The potentially interesting casting gimmick (Peter/Craig is sure to be a "dream role" for many a twenty-something actor who likes the sound of his own voice) is cancelled out by this thoroughly uninteresting play. It's the kind of play that makes me feel like my mom: I don't care about any of these characters and I don't get the sense that they care about each other, or that Shinn cares about the Iraq War.

[Martin Denton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Christopher Shinn's play Dying City is about a young woman named Kelly and her relationships with a pair of identical twins, Craig and Peter. Peter is gay, an actor who is just beginning a lucrative film career and has returned east to appear in a revival of Long Day's Journey Into Night (presumably on Broadway). Craig, whom we meet in flashbacks that are interspersed among the present-day scenes, is Kelly's husband, a writer who was ROTC at Harvard and has been called back to duty in Iraq. Not long after Craig left for the war, he was killed (possibly committed suicide). Kelly hasn't seen Peter since Craig's funeral, a year before. Peter wants to bond with Kelly, despite her obvious reticence/reluctance. He's brought a packet of emails that Craig sent him from Iraq that he wants Kelly to read. And he wants to follow up on a proposal involving having a baby, something he suggested to her in a letter that she never replied to.

The "dying city" of the play's title is Baghdad, evoked very briefly but eloquently in one of Craig's emails. Craig started out gung-ho in favor of the war (though Kelly and perhaps also Peter have always opposed it). The emails reveal, among other things, that Craig came to believe that the American invasion was wrong--the city has died, it seems, because America has killed it.

Shinn, here and throughout his play, wants to make Dying City bigger than the convoluted triangle that is Kelly, Craig, and Peter's story. Social commentary, some of it quite astute and well-articulated, keeps cropping up: Peter wonders why people are satisfied to watch Jon Stewart make fun of President Bush on The Daily Show rather than actually do something to change the status quo; Kelly constantly reminds both Craig and Peter than her patients (she's a therapist) are human beings, not two-dimensional caricatures that can be reduced to flippant Seinfeldian labels.

But the connections between the playwright's socio-political agenda and the story he's chosen to tell never quite get made. Shinn plots in so many specific details (see my first paragraph) that we lose track of what's supposed to matter in the play. At the end I wasn't sure what to make of all the information I'd received.

[Da'Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw this play last summer at the Second Stage Theater and was a teary mess during the show and afterward so out of it that it took me many hours to feel normal again. It was so unsettling, the emotions and pain in and among the characters so palpable even—no, especially—when they're silent. I was more emotionally impacted by this show than by any other production of any play I've ever seen.

And now that I've purchased the script and read it, too, and analyzed it and noticed things I missed, decisions Shinn made in constructing this work that take it to the nth degree of greatness, there's no doubt in my mind that this play 100 percent deserves a spot in the canon of great theater. Thank you, Christopher Shinn, for this amazing, amazing work.

[Bobby Sullivan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yeah, I pretty much hated this play. The dialogue didn't ring true at all, and the plot was contrived. For the life of me, I can't figure out what Shinn is trying to say. Is the drama the tension between the straight military brother and his gay actor twin? Or is it about the actor brother cheating on his boyfriend with multiple partners? Or maybe the military brother cheating on his wife? Perhaps the conflicting attitudes of the characters to the Iraq War, or the fact that the military considers his marriage a mistake. Or the "accident"/suicide. Everything's in here but the proverbial kitchen sink, and it makes for one unholy mess.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just as I was getting invested in the characters, the play was over. I sometimes like (or at least can appreciate) abrupt and ambiguous endings, but there were so many huge topics and tangled plot lines going, and none of them got enough dialogue to approach any kind of real statement, let alone resolution. I feel a bit cheated, like Christopher Shinn used vague hints and somber concepts to punch me in the stomach, then ran away before I could form an opinion about why he would do that. At the same time, while I wish there had been more there, I found what was there intriguing.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting play but not as deep as I would like. The characters are well drawn but the dialogue rambles around a lot for a short play.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely well-crafted, creepy thriller about a woman caught up with two no-good brothers.

[Isa Davies · Rating 3 out of 5]

really mid….was not a fan😭😭

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seriously, how did August: Osage County win the Pulitzer over two vastly superior plays? I read Yellow Face shortly before Dying City and was convinced it should have won the Pulitzer. After reading Dying City, as much as Yellow Face impressed me, I think Dying City should have won.

Dying City is a small play: only two actors playing three characters. Following the death of his twin brother, a man comes to see his former sister-in-law. The play jumps back and forth between the wife and husband, and the widow and former brother-in-law. It’s a subtle, subtle story but exquisitely crafted. It stuck with me for days after finishing, and the more I think about it, the more I appreciate the depth and nuance.

What most amazed me is how Mr. Shinn captured the time period in which he wrote, including the emotions and mood of 2005 and 2006. It’s incredible, and I haven’t come across another work that better represents that moment in time and America’s emotional state. Here’s hoping that, as it ages, Dying City is more and more appreciated for what it represents as a both a play and a cultural touchstone. Highly recommended.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the one hand, a beautifully written play filled with luscious, surprising and ambiguous character arcs. On the other hand, a strong argument for why political thinking can't really be advanced by luscious, surprising and ambiguous character arcs. Also, the subtlety of the writing isn't well served by the actual plot (identical twins?!?), the flashbacks, the use of emails from a dead character, and the overall sense that the backstory is constantly drowning out the frontstory.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rather short, two person play. While an interesting commentary on passive aggression, it is not specific as to what the actual primary storyline was intended to be. The dialogue also includes a large amount of pop culture references which may be lost to audiences as the play ages.

[Kris Vire · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for work. Interesting structure, and I like that it addresses the Iraq war without being an Iraq War Play. Looking forward to seeing it in production.

[Josh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pulitzer finalist whatever. Anti-war and post-9/11, without new insight. For a two-actor play, the female's role is fairly undeveloped.

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saw this excellent play and came home and bought the script. Reads well too!

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's some interesting stuff here that might be neat to watch on stage but the stakes of the drama never seemed high enough to consider the events of the play important.

[Kendra Carlson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short but interesting in the end. Wouldn't recommend it. Seems to be of its time - but too soon to be reflective of it in an interesting way.

[Playwright42]

This was a 2008 Pulitzer finalist? Really?