Four - Acting Edition

by Christopher Shinn

From the author's website On a lonely 4th of July in Hartford, four isolated individuals search for connection. “The usual race and class equations have been upended. Nothing is emotionally simple. The play keeps delivering small shocks and aches that end in a standoff, or maybe in that pause between despair, resignation, and a twinge of hope. Haunting.” – Margo Jefferson, New York Times “Shinn’s landscape of desire is bleak but profoundly familiar. Four eloquently captures the things people don’t say on their way to not getting the love they want.” – Don Shewey, The Advocate “Four opens with the image of a heartbreakingly jangled teenager trying to get up the nerve to keep a date. For the next 90 minutes, Shinn renders in fine detail an awkward world of youthful self- consciousness, desire and seemingly insurmountable emotional confusion.” – Nelson Pressley, Washington Post world Royal Court Theatre, 1998

Genres: Plays, Drama

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

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

[Martin Denton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four is an impressionistic panorama of contemporary American life around the turn of the millennium; a portrait of disconnection and detachment, of aloneness and longing. It's at once sad, bleak, scary, and surprisingly hopeful; and it's breathtakingly, galvanizingly real. The Four of the title are all residents of the once-much-larger small city of Hartford, Connecticut; it's the Fourth of July, 1996. In the empty parking lot of a shut-down Marshall's department store, 16-year-old June (a boy, despite the name) is arranging to meet up with Joe. And on a cellphone in her family's living room, African-American teenager Abigayle is toying with going out with would-be homeboy Dexter.

These folks all have baggage to spare. June is gay, scared, repressed, and nevertheless eager to explore his sexuality ("I'm horny" is how he puts it). Joe, who turns out to be Abigayle's father, is every bit as scared and repressed (maybe more so) and, apparently, a pedophile. Joe and June met on the Internet; the older man disarms June and us immediately by acknowledging that what he and his underage companion are about to do is against the law.

Abigayle (who most likely doesn't know as much about her unhappy dad as we do) is saddled with a demanding and incapacitated mother and, perhaps even more unfortunately, a mature, sensitive, questing intelligence that makes her long for much more than she finds herself settling for. Dexter (who, tonight, is what Abigayle will settle for) is a likable, confused, very ordinary young man with a decent heart but only average intelligence.

Shinn places his Four in a landscape of parking lots, movie theatres, playgrounds, and cars--public places that here feel staggeringly lonely and abandoned. These people live in a world of fast food and fifteen-minute-celebrities; everything is insubstantial and weirdly illusory: there's nothing for any of them to hold onto. Four would be a tragedy, only June and Joe and Abigayle and Dexter don't see it that way; that's why Four is, instead, so distressingly resonant.

[By The Cover · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Shinn writes really good tension in his dialogue.

[Chambers Stevens · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the 2nd play I read of the talented Mr. Shinn.
And I believe it is his first play.
Hard to believe this is a first play.
Of course I don't love it as much as Dying City.
But that wouldn't be fair because Shinn had some experience under in belt by the time he wrote that masterpiece.
Still Four is solid. And has some scenes that will scare the crap out of you.

[Nick K · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting piece. Most of the "meat" was in between the spoken lines. The tension was palpable and the guilt in each character was true and deep. I like how the author leaves it open for interpretation just enough so that it's not too obscure. This play will resonate with people who hide an undeniable guilt in their core that is near impossible to put into words.