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Man from Nebraska
A luxury sedan, a church pew and visits to a nursing home form the comfortable round of Ken Carpenter s daily life. And then one night, he awakens to find that he no longer believes in God. This crisis of faith propels an ordinary middle-aged man into an extraordinary journey of self-discovery. This wickedly funny and spiritually complex play examines the effects of one man s awakening on himself and his family.
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
264 people want to read
About the author
Tracy Letts
15 books238 followersTracy Letts is an American playwright and actor who received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play August: Osage County.
Letts was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma to best-selling author Billie Letts, of Where The Heart Is and The Honk And Holler Opening Soon fame, and the late college professor and actor Dennis Letts. His brother Shawn is a jazz musician and composer. He also has a brother Dana. Letts was raised in Durant, Oklahoma and graduated from Durant High School in the early 1980s. He moved to Dallas, where he waited tables and worked in telemarketing while starting as an actor. He acted in Jerry Flemmons' O Dammit!, which was part of a new playwrights series sponsored by Southern Methodist University.
Letts moved to Chicago at the age of 20, and worked for the next 11 years at Steppenwolf and Famous Door. He's still an active member of the Steppenwolf company today. He was a founding member of Bang Bang Spontaneous Theater, whose members included Greg Kotis (Tony Award-winner for Urinetown), Michael Shannon (Academy Award-nominee for Revolutionary Road), Paul Dillon, and Amy Pietz. In 1991, Letts wrote the play Killer Joe. Two years later, the play premiered at the Next Lab Theater in Chicago, followed by the 29th Street Rep in NYC. Since then, Killer Joe has been performed in at least 15 countries in 12 languages.
In 2008, Letts won a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for August: Osage County. It had premiered in Chicago in 2007, before moving to New York. It opened on Broadway in 2007 and ran into 2009.
His mother Billie Letts has said of his writing, "I try to be upbeat and funny. Everybody in Tracy's stories gets naked or dead." Letts' plays have been about people struggling with moral and spiritual questions. He says he was inspired by the plays of Tennessee Williams and the novels of William Faulkner and Jim Thompson. Letts considers sound to be a very strong storytelling tool for theater.
Letts was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma to best-selling author Billie Letts, of Where The Heart Is and The Honk And Holler Opening Soon fame, and the late college professor and actor Dennis Letts. His brother Shawn is a jazz musician and composer. He also has a brother Dana. Letts was raised in Durant, Oklahoma and graduated from Durant High School in the early 1980s. He moved to Dallas, where he waited tables and worked in telemarketing while starting as an actor. He acted in Jerry Flemmons' O Dammit!, which was part of a new playwrights series sponsored by Southern Methodist University.
Letts moved to Chicago at the age of 20, and worked for the next 11 years at Steppenwolf and Famous Door. He's still an active member of the Steppenwolf company today. He was a founding member of Bang Bang Spontaneous Theater, whose members included Greg Kotis (Tony Award-winner for Urinetown), Michael Shannon (Academy Award-nominee for Revolutionary Road), Paul Dillon, and Amy Pietz. In 1991, Letts wrote the play Killer Joe. Two years later, the play premiered at the Next Lab Theater in Chicago, followed by the 29th Street Rep in NYC. Since then, Killer Joe has been performed in at least 15 countries in 12 languages.
In 2008, Letts won a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for August: Osage County. It had premiered in Chicago in 2007, before moving to New York. It opened on Broadway in 2007 and ran into 2009.
His mother Billie Letts has said of his writing, "I try to be upbeat and funny. Everybody in Tracy's stories gets naked or dead." Letts' plays have been about people struggling with moral and spiritual questions. He says he was inspired by the plays of Tennessee Williams and the novels of William Faulkner and Jim Thompson. Letts considers sound to be a very strong storytelling tool for theater.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
January 26, 2018
I want to see this on stage!!! My kinda theatre--real people, simple situations, and honoring silence. Felt that it ended kinda fast, playwright could have developed that more, thus 4 stars.
September 22, 2017
۲.۵
زیادی معمولی بود!
زیادی معمولی بود!
December 29, 2019
I was definitely not, and likely never will be, in the headspace to read about a cishet white man having a midlife crisis. It was well written, and parts were funny or touching, but mostly I was just annoyed and had no patience for the guy.
December 11, 2022
Contemplative. Slow. Excellent. A portrait of marriage in presence and in absence. A truthful look at relationships between parents and children, mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters, between aging sick parents and their children. Between persons of different countries, socioeconomic status’s, purposes in life, beliefs. Between yourself and approaching death. Not a road map to finding yourself for a reader, but it’s a place to start.
March 9, 2021
This feels like such a dip in quality for Tracy Letts that I find myself reading into it to try and find deeper significance.
September 4, 2022
Tracy Letts understands the nuances of being human more than most of us. The man is a treasure. This play is a doozy.
As I read more and more of his work, I'm finding delightful calling cards that keep reappearing. An "eat the fish!" moment, a scene where an older woman applies hand lotion, meals taking place and being shown in real time, beds on stage, non-sexual nudity, casting Michael Shannon in premiers, silence... it truly kills me that I've only seen two of his shows on stage. I'm about to start dropping everything and drive across the country when I hear of companies putting up his work.
I was wary of this when I realized God would be such a pivotal part of the script. I was afraid of Letts being a secret devout Christian or something, but he seems to neither damn nor support people who practice organized religion, instead opting to merely present the pros and cons. Obsessed with the cover photograph and original (?) staging, I think I've figured out how they did it, and if I'm right, I'm in love.
Need a Letts collection to come out so I don't have to collect all of these individually.
As I read more and more of his work, I'm finding delightful calling cards that keep reappearing. An "eat the fish!" moment, a scene where an older woman applies hand lotion, meals taking place and being shown in real time, beds on stage, non-sexual nudity, casting Michael Shannon in premiers, silence... it truly kills me that I've only seen two of his shows on stage. I'm about to start dropping everything and drive across the country when I hear of companies putting up his work.
I was wary of this when I realized God would be such a pivotal part of the script. I was afraid of Letts being a secret devout Christian or something, but he seems to neither damn nor support people who practice organized religion, instead opting to merely present the pros and cons. Obsessed with the cover photograph and original (?) staging, I think I've figured out how they did it, and if I'm right, I'm in love.
Need a Letts collection to come out so I don't have to collect all of these individually.
November 20, 2019
3.5 stars rounded up. A sudden loss of faith, the disappearance of a belief in a God is the stated crisis of a mild, Midwestern man. Like a Beckett character, the character Ken seems to barely exist, like flickering candle - until he let's in the truth of how he's allowed his fundamental beliefs to lie untested. In many ways I want this script to expand into so much more than it does. In particular, the ending is sudden, mysterious, and unsatisfying. However, many other scenes capture Ken's pure terror and desperation so well as he reacts to his realization that he may never have lived his own life and that what he called life may be meaningless and hollow. How Lett's portrays so well Ken's crisis as it play out in concert with the reactions of those close to him - wife, daughter, pastor, etc. - make this play worth reading or watching.
January 29, 2023
I enjoyed this play immensely. Letts leans a bit too much into the AppleBee's, Outbacks, and Winn-Dixie's of suburban Middle America to situate Ken and Nancy in the culture, but they are complicated people from Flyover Country -- just like my own relatives. This is not the story of Ken's religious crisis as much as it is his wakeup from the complacency in his own marriage. A wonderful play, especially for anyone of a certain age whose marriage may have needed to be questioned and re-dedicated.
March 28, 2020
Play started interesting with a man having a crisis of faith. I was hooked. Then it turned into a trite midlife crisis with the same trite excuses. Yawn. I ended having zero sympathy for main character, doubly so when Letts attempts to sully other characters to justify the main character’s idiocy. Not recommended.
March 9, 2024
A simple yet still riveting work surrounding a mid-life spiritual crisis by an average Joe in middle America. The story moves rapidly and while it doesn't offer much enlightenment, it has a lot of fun along the way.
May 3, 2024
3.5 stars. Nice, easy to read story. Well written as usual from Letts. Little bit of a lighter ending than I would’ve liked… would have been great if Nancy had left him at the end… maybe then I’d have given it 4 stars 😉 but overall a very good play
March 1, 2019
The reimagined midlife crisis. The storyline does not stay with the reader like most of Letts' other plays.
November 1, 2021
One of his quieter plays. He will revisit some of these themes in his play, "Linda Vista". Another play about a man with a mid-life crisis.
May 7, 2022
Tracy Letts sure loves to write a scene about a broken down man who weeps into a woman. I really enjoyed the conversations this play explores. But over as a play - it’s not my favorite.
October 11, 2022
This was the first play I’ve read in a long time. It was both funny and sad, but somewhat predictable.
November 10, 2025
empaths when a normal man has existential problems:
June 13, 2019
Tracy Letts’ Man From Nebraska, a play in two acts, 17 movements, and twenty-nine scenes, is a situational comedy centered on Ken Carpenter, a middle aged white guy from Lincoln, Nebraska, who’s having a mid-life, middle of nowhere crisis rooted in his discovery that he very likely no longer believes in God, despite his rearing in the Baptist church and weekly church attendance. Consequently, his slow-paced, uneventful life and that of his wife, Nancy are thrown into turmoil. Acting on his pastor’s advice, Ken takes a long overdue and unexpected vacation, where he is woefully trying to sort out his thoughts and feelings, because, while he can’t explain much about what he’s experiencing, he at least knows he’s confused. The play, then, unfolds for us as life unfolds for Ken. No one is very sure of the outcome.
I enjoyed reading the play and could easily imagine seeing a realized production on stage. The characters are both humorous and realistically written. This is the kind of play that would spark conversation for those that the play engages. It’s a slow-moving play, which might not be to everyone’s liking.
I enjoyed reading the play and could easily imagine seeing a realized production on stage. The characters are both humorous and realistically written. This is the kind of play that would spark conversation for those that the play engages. It’s a slow-moving play, which might not be to everyone’s liking.
February 22, 2017
Tracy Letts's "Man from Nebraska" sits nicely with "August Osage County" and "Bug" as a sort of trilogy of lost, middle-aged, middle-American characters struggling with existence. This play finds our protagonist not believing in god and in a marriage to a religious woman and a father to religious kids, so when the young pastor tells him to take off on a vacation, the family unit crumbles as he searches for something to replace his now-vacant slot where once there was faith. Ken, our lead, ends up in London and runs into a bartender and her sculptor boyfriend and the trio get involved in drugs and art. If you're a fan of Letts's dark humour and smooth, snappy dialogue, "Man from Nebraska" is just as thrilling and memorable as any of his other work.
March 29, 2011
I started out NOT enjoying this play very much, but as I got through it, it grew on me a bit.
Tracy Letts has a bit of a theme running here with this play and his much more successful AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, and that would be a theme of late-middle-aged men trying to understand their lives. In many ways, one could almost see this as a pre-cursor to AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY.
Both plays (and I will try, of course, to speak more to this play directly) deal with an older man who has some interest or experience in the arts. In A:OC it's a poet and here it's a man who thinks he no longer believes in god, leaves his family to discover himself, and finds art in the form of sculpture. He's not very good, of course, but it brings him to a better understanding of himself AND a creator.
As a middle-aged artist who has let his art slide, I could identify mightily with our lonesome hero, Ken Carpenter (and yes, the name Carpenter is a wonderful symbol in so many ways as the Christian god-in-flesh was a carpenter, and as a sculptor, an artist uses many of the same or similar tools as a carpenter). His desire to find passion in life is probably understood by many men, and that passion is not necessarily a sensual or sexual passion. That passion is relayed here as sexual, artistic, and religious.
What did not ring true for me was how quickly and easily Carpenter seemed to make his break. Certainly some (if not all) of this would be made up for by the actor portraying the character.
The only other part that bothered me was how many short scenes there were. We jumped quickly and loosely and it made it difficult to keep a thread of the story together, even though the scenes really revolved around Ken. The scenes with Ken's wife, Nancy, just didn't work as well. It seemed too late to try to make the audience care about what Nancy was going through and how stalwart she was toward Ken.
Still...Letts has a great sense of theme and plot and subplot and uses his imagery very well. This is a play that takes a little getting used to, but could work on many levels.
Tracy Letts has a bit of a theme running here with this play and his much more successful AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, and that would be a theme of late-middle-aged men trying to understand their lives. In many ways, one could almost see this as a pre-cursor to AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY.
Both plays (and I will try, of course, to speak more to this play directly) deal with an older man who has some interest or experience in the arts. In A:OC it's a poet and here it's a man who thinks he no longer believes in god, leaves his family to discover himself, and finds art in the form of sculpture. He's not very good, of course, but it brings him to a better understanding of himself AND a creator.
As a middle-aged artist who has let his art slide, I could identify mightily with our lonesome hero, Ken Carpenter (and yes, the name Carpenter is a wonderful symbol in so many ways as the Christian god-in-flesh was a carpenter, and as a sculptor, an artist uses many of the same or similar tools as a carpenter). His desire to find passion in life is probably understood by many men, and that passion is not necessarily a sensual or sexual passion. That passion is relayed here as sexual, artistic, and religious.
What did not ring true for me was how quickly and easily Carpenter seemed to make his break. Certainly some (if not all) of this would be made up for by the actor portraying the character.
The only other part that bothered me was how many short scenes there were. We jumped quickly and loosely and it made it difficult to keep a thread of the story together, even though the scenes really revolved around Ken. The scenes with Ken's wife, Nancy, just didn't work as well. It seemed too late to try to make the audience care about what Nancy was going through and how stalwart she was toward Ken.
Still...Letts has a great sense of theme and plot and subplot and uses his imagery very well. This is a play that takes a little getting used to, but could work on many levels.
October 25, 2013
I would have liked this play better if I'd read if before "August: Osage County." The idea of religious faith and how it is passed down from parent to child, as well as the fallout when one's faith fails are themes that I enjoy exploring in fiction, and this particular work addresses these in the life of a middle-aged man from Nebraska.
"Do you ever look around? At the people around you, their habits and their things they do. The way they live, that we live. Do you ever think about the food we eat, and think about where the food comes from, where it goes? All the people" (20).
"Do you ever look around? At the people around you, their habits and their things they do. The way they live, that we live. Do you ever think about the food we eat, and think about where the food comes from, where it goes? All the people" (20).
March 31, 2012
A strange play about a man's spiritual and emotional journey from Nebraska to England. Gentle but hard to pin down, this play intrigues because of its images: a man crying in a bathroom because he doesn't believe in God anymore, someone punching a sculpture into being, etc.
I'm not sure where I landed at the end of the play, but the path there was intriguing enough to earn my admiration.
I'm not sure where I landed at the end of the play, but the path there was intriguing enough to earn my admiration.
July 18, 2013
Small cast play - centers on an older couple dealing with a crisis in faith - mainly Ken's. Great moments of doubt & conviction as Ken travels around the world to find answers. Love the short scenes in Act One (written as 'movements' which depicts the crawling monotony of a repetitious life). Fairly open-ended. It is a Tracy Letts play after all.
November 26, 2012
Good play, not a great one. Lousy title. Written in a way that makes you think Letts was trying to attract an aging Hollywood type to make the role his in a movie a la Bill Murray in Lost in Translation or Broken Flowers.
January 4, 2014
Very funny
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June 22, 2010signed & inscribed by author
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews