STUNNING

by David Adjimi, tells the story of 16-year-old Lily. She has everything she ever dreamed of. She’s still a teenager but she just married Ike. He is not exactly a charmer and he’s really old — like, 40 — but he’s rich. Now Lily is living the good life in the insular Syrian-Jewish section of Brooklyn in a beautiful new house, with lots of clothes and jewelry, and good friends. If she can just forget about Ike her life would be perfect. When she hires Blanche, a housekeeper, Lily’s
sheltered world opens up in ways she could never have imagined.

HOW TO SEE STUNNING:
$20 tickets • June 1-27
Duke on 42nd Street, 229 W.
42 St. Visit www.lct.org
for more info.

“Stunning is a play set in this city, in this very moment, about people you might see on the subway or on the street. It’s about identity, about a teenager
grappling with making choices and deliberating about the kind of person she wants to be.”

MONSTROSITY

by
Lucy Thurber, is a dark, epic tale of singing teenage fascists, magic, war, commerce and love—a disturbing retelling of the hero’s tale with a girl as the hero and an unheroic ending. How does a revolution begin? And who decides?

MONSTROSITY
explores leadership and power, and the responsibility that a citizen has to themselves, their family and their country.

HOW TO SEE MONSTROSITY:

$18 tickets • July 9-19
Connelly Theatre, 220 E. 4th St. Visit www.13p.org for more info.

 

“Theatre is live,
it is immediate.
It is communal.
It asks the audience
to be part of an
experience where
we all sit and
hopefully are
human together.”

 

 

 

PxP: What inspired you to write this play?

David: I was broke and I asked my mother if I could move back in with her, in my childhood home, so that I could write and not have to pay rent. It was so strange being back in that room again, in that house, and in that neighborhood--I hadn’t been there in a while. The whole thing seemed preserved in a way. And one day I thought, “Oh, I’ll just write a play and set it here.” I was consciously avoiding writing my “Brooklyn play” — the idioms and ideas of Brooklyn seem so fixed in the cultural imagination. I found another way to do it. I really wrote this play to be performed in my mother’s garage with flashlights, so it’s incredibly strange to me that it’s getting all this attention.

Lucy: I began to obsess over how close a society is to fascism at any moment. I wondered about freedom and liberty versus the desire to belong to something
greater than yourself. The conflicting desires between the individual and the whole. I started reading about revolutionaries. They seemed to always be young enough that the idea of mortality, of ones own death, wasn’t real yet. I read about the Hitler Youth Movement and how feelings of euphoria, of being part of a movement, could lead individuals down a path of destruction. I also have always loved the the hero’s story and I wanted to write a classic epic tale where the hero was a girl.

PxP: Why is new theatre important?

Lucy: It is current. It’s about what’s happening in our lives, our country and our world today.

David: I feel that art should speak to the present moment, and my plays are always these dialogues between the past and the present. I think really extraordinary new plays pop with the immediacy of this very historical moment. Classics are great but it’s important to keep the ecology of art alive.

Lucy: Theatre is live, it is immediate. It is communal. It asks the audience to be part
of an experience where we all sit and hopefully are human together.

David: Theatre has its limitations, but it can also do things that other media can’t. It’s not flashy like film, but the intimacy it offers, the challenges, the ideas, the engagement with image and metaphor, the liveness — I think it can be enormously exciting.

PxP: Why should teenagers in New York City see your play?

David: STUNNING is a play set in this city, in this very moment, about people you might see on the subway or on the street. It’s about identity, about a teenager grappling with making choices and deliberating about the kind of person she wants to be in this rather repressive culture. Which is in a way what all teenagers have to deal with.

Lucy: MONSTROSITY is about teenagers and young people starting a revolution and taking over the world.