Dead City

by Sheila Callaghan

Full Length, Comic Drama / 3m, 4f / Unit Set It's June 16, 2004. Samantha Blossom, a chipper woman in her 40s, wakes up one June morning in her Upper East Side apartment to find her life being narrated over the airwaves of public radio. She discovers in the mail an envelope addressed to her husband from his lover, which spins her raw and untethered into an odyssey through the city.... a day full of chance encounters, coincidences, a quick love affair, and a fixation on the mysterious Jewel Jupiter. Jewel, the young but damaged poet genius, eventually takes a shine to Samantha and brings her on a midnight tour of the meat-packing district which changes Samantha's life forever-or doesn't. This 90 minute comic drama is a modernized, gender-reversed, relocated, hyper-theatrical riff on the novel Ulysses, occurring exactly 100 years to the day after Joyce's jaunt through Dublin. "Wonderful... Sheila Callaghan's pleasingly witty and theatrical new drama that is a love letter to New York masquerading as hate mail...[Callaghan] writes with a world-weary tone and has a poet's gift for economical description. The entire dead city comes alive..." -New York Times. "DEAD CITY, Sheila Callaghan's riff on James Joyce's ULYSSES is stylish, lyrical, fascinating, occasionally irritating, and eminently worthwhile... the kind of work that is thoroughly invigorating." -Backstage.

Genres: Plays, Drama

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Cassie · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I had read Ulysses, I think I would have gotten a better grasp on the mood and atmosphere behind Callaghan's inspiration. A very visual piece of theatre.