Kirjahaku

Three plays about transformation, intimacy and power from award-winning American Playwright Jen Silverman. Contains the plays The Roommate; The Moors and Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties.Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties - Five different women named Betty collide at the intersection of anger, sex, and the “thea-tah”, falling in love in unexpected ways.The Moors - Two sisters and a dog living on the bleak English moors, and dreaming of love and power, are surprised by a sudden arrival. The Moors is a dark comedy about love, desperation, and visibility.In The Roommate a middle-aged housewife makes a new friend with a big secret. A dark comedy about what it takes to re-route your life - and what happens when the wheels come off.

After a humiliating scandal, a young writer flees to the West Coast, where she is drawn into the morally ambiguous orbit of a charismatic filmmaker and the teenage girls who are her next subjects. FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD - ONE OF BUZZFEED'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - "A blistering story about the costs of creating art."--O: The Oprah Magazine Not too long ago, Cass was a promising young playwright in New York, hailed as "a fierce new voice" and "queer, feminist, and ready to spill the tea." But at the height of all this attention, Cass finds herself at the center of a searing public shaming, and flees to Los Angeles to escape--and reinvent herself. There she meets her next-door neighbor Caroline, a magnetic filmmaker on the rise, as well as the pack of teenage girls who hang around her house. They are the subjects of Caroline's next semidocumentary movie, which follows the girls' clandestine activity: a Fight Club inspired by the violent classic. As Cass is drawn into the film's orbit, she is awed by Caroline's ambition and confidence. But over time, she becomes troubled by how deeply Caroline is manipulating the teens in the name of art--especially as the consequences become increasingly disturbing. With her past proving hard to shake and her future one she's no longer sure she wants, Cass is forced to reckon with her own ambitions and confront what she has come to believe about the steep price of success.

Two sisters and a dog live out their lives on the bleak English moors dreaming of love and power. The arrival of a hapless governess and a moor-hen set all three on a strange and dangerous path. The Moors is a dark comedy about love desperation and visibility.

Sharon, in her mid-fifties, is recently divorced and needs a roommate to share her Iowa home. Robyn, also in her mid-fifties, needs a place to hide and a chance to start over. But as Sharon begins to uncover Robyn's secrets, they encourage her own deep-seated desire to transform her life completely. A dark comedy about what it takes to re-route your life - and what happens when the wheels come off.

Betty is rich; Betty is lonely; Betty's busy working on her truck; Betty wants to talk about love but Betty needs to hit something. And Betty keeps using a small hand mirror to stare into parts of herself she's never examined. Five different women named Betty collide at the intersection of anger sex and the "thea-tah."

Wink follows unhappy housewife Sofie and her breadwinning husband, Gregor, who both seek weekly counseling from an unorthodox therapist, Doctor Frans. Their current topic of disagreement: the cat, Wink. When Wink goes missing, violent desires, domestic anarchy, and feline vengeance emerge, threatening the neatly ordered reality Sophie, Gregor, and Doctor Frans have constructed.

A charming devil arrives in the quiet village of Edmonton to bargain for the souls of its residents in exchange for their darkest wishes. Elizabeth should be his easiest target having been labeled a "witch" and cast out by the town but her soul is not so readily bought. As the devil returns to convince her - and then returns again - unexpected passions flare alliances are formed and the village is forever changed. An inventive retelling of a Jacobean drama this sharp subversive fable debates how much our souls are worth when hope is hard to come by.

Step into a sophisticated, slippery world where the line between truth and fiction is all in the packaging. It's 1936, and a pair of passionate filmmakers have landed their next big project: a sweeping Spanish Civil War film with the potential to change American hearts and minds. It just happens to be bankrolled by the KGB. This seductive and funny new play about the art of propaganda and the dangerous, ongoing Disinformation Age explores how art can change the world for better and worse.

A woman is pulled into a love affair with a radical activist, unknowingly echoing her family's dangerous past and risking the foundations of her future in this electrifying novel. "An exhilarating novel of star-crossed romances and radical politics, with writing so evocative I swear I could smell the tear gas."--Nathan Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Nix and Wellness Minnow has always tried to lead the life her single father modeled--private, quiet, hardworking, apolitical. So she is rocked when an instinctive decision to help a student makes her the notorious public face of a scandal in the small town where she teaches. As tensions rise, death threats follow, and an overwhelmed Minnow flees to a teaching position in Paris. There, she falls into an exhilarating and all-consuming relationship with Charles, a young Frenchman whose activism has placed him at odds with his powerful family. As Minnow is pulled in to the daring protest Charles and his friends are planning, she unknowingly almost repeats a secret tragedy from her family's past. Her father wasn't always the restrained, conservative man he appears today. There are things he has taken great pains to conceal from his family and from the world. In 1968, Keen is avoiding the Vietnam draft by pursuing a PhD at Harvard. He lives his life in the basement chemistry lab, studiously ignoring the news. But when he unexpectedly falls in love with Olya, a fiery community organizer, he is consumed by her world and loses sight of his own. Learning that his deferment has ended and he's been drafted, Keen agrees to participate in the latest action that Olya is leading--one with more dangerous and far-reaching consequences than he could have imagined. Minnow's and Keen's intertwining stories take us through the turmoil of the late sixties student movements and into the chaos of the modern world. Exploding with suspense, heart, and intelligence, There's Going to Be Trouble is a story about revolution, legacy, passionate love, and how we live with the consequences of our darkest secrets.

In Collective Rage, the lives of five very different New York women named Betty collide at the intersection of anger, sex and “theat-ah.” As they meet, fall in love, rehearse, revel and rage, they realise that they’ve been stuck reading the same scripts for far too long.They all come from different backgrounds, and are bored or angry about different things, but the Betty's - each one numbered 1-5 - come together to rehearse a new version of Pyramus and Thisbe, the play within a play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What follows are discoveries, transformations and raucous comedy. Hitting the ring with an electrifying soundtrack, looks to kill and spectacular routines, this outrageous comedy packs the punch to shatter lacquered femininity into a thousand glittering pieces. Strongly influenced by cabaret and female drag, this exquisite rejection of shame and stereotype will punch you in the gut, break your heart and then take you dancing.Collective Rage had its UK premiere at the Southwark Playhouse.

'As funny as it's intellectual, this page-turner about crashing and burning is spot-on about ambition, infatuation, theatre, film, ethics, teens, and everything else.' Emma Donoghue, author of Room 'Witty...Earnest...Laugh-out-loud...Pitch-perfect' New York TimesIn the pursuit of fame, how do you know when you've gone too far?When Cass - a thirty-something, promising, queer playwright - receives a prestigious award, it seems as though her career is finally taking off. That is until she finds herself at the centre of a searing public shaming, which relegates her from rising star in New York to a nobody on her best friend's sofa in L.A. As she comes to terms with the extent of her failure, she is forced to question who she is without the thing that has always defined her: her art. So she fills the days by stalking her playwright nemesis, of whom she is excruciatingly envious, and getting pulled into the orbit of the charismatic but manipulative filmmaker next door. As Cass becomes increasingly involved with her neighbour and the group of pugilistic teenage girls she's documenting, Cass begins to dream of a comeback. But when the film spins dangerously out of control, Cass is once again forced to reckon with her ambition, and her rage.We Play Ourselves is a darkly funny novel about the cost of making art, and the art of making enemies. 'Funny, sharp, modern - this is an excellent debut novel. Its bold, edgy, strange heroine has adventures and misadventures, screws up again and again, but somehow won my love. I couldn't put this book down.' Weike Wang, PEN/Hemingway-award winning author of Chemistry

'As funny as it's intellectual, this page-turner about crashing and burning is spot-on about ambition, infatuation, theatre, film, ethics, teens, and everything else.' Emma Donoghue, author of Room 'Witty...Earnest...Laugh-out-loud...Pitch-perfect' New York TimesWhen Cass - a thirty something year old queer playwright - receives a prestigious award, it seems as though her career is finally taking off. That is until she finds herself at the centre of a searing public shaming. Fleeing New York, Cass moves to L.A. to start anew. Once there, she is pulled into the orbit of her charismatic neighbour, a filmmaker who's making an ethically murky documentary inspired by a group of teenage girls and their underground fight club. But just as Cass begins to dream of a comeback, the past starts to catch up with her and she is forced once more to reckon with her ambition and the chaos it creates. We Play Ourselves is a darkly funny novel about the cost of making art, and the art of making enemies.'Funny, sharp, modern - this is an excellent debut novel. Its bold, edgy, strange heroine has adventures and misadventures, screws up again and again, but somehow won my love. I couldn't put this book down.' Weike Wang, PEN/Hemingway-award winning author of Chemistry

"Jen Silverman's poems are baptisms of desire. They've traveled the world and come back to tell you the pleasure to be found there, the holes of each leaving, the way it is all 'drenched in light and wine.' Economical in syntax and generous in image, Bath astonishes at every turn with its heart, its wisdom, its waters."- Traci Brimhall, author of our lady of the ruins"I have a crush on Jen Silverman's language. This multi-hyphenate wordsmith writes poetry that sings with silver fish scales, bathes in love, hopes for redemption. I'll read with ardor anything Silverman writes, in any genre." - Sarah Ruhl, playwright of Eurydice

Silverman isn’t interested in the dull details of conventional storytelling…Delicious [and] surreal. …A play that gives two noningénues strange [and] meaty roles. (New York Times) Sharon’s never had a roommate before. In fact, there’s a lot Sharon’s never done before, but Robyn’s about to change all that. Jen Silverman’s The Roommate shatters expectations with its witty and profound portrait of a blossoming intimacy between two women from vastly different backgrounds, as they navigate the complexities of identity, morality, and the promise of reinvention. Being bad never felt so good as it does in this riveting one-act about second acts. This revised and updated edition was published to coincide with the 2024 Broadway production which starred Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone.