“Fifty Words has a gimlet eye, providing meticulously chosen, artfully integrated details that let us understand why its characters so love and loathe each other. Like Mr. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? it understands how closely hate and love can be linked in marriage. ”—Ben Brantley, The New York Times

“What the Night is For [is an] after-hours accounting of an infidelity’s aftershocks that has a quality of inevitability and emotional danger. . . . As in Weller’s signature works which bookended the ’70s with pulse-taking portraits, he dramatizes our fear of the zero-sum game. ”—Rob Kendt, Los Angeles Times

Three new interwoven works by Michael Weller, “a bold dramatist who specializes in family portraits in weighty topical frames” (The New York Times), that turn his precision dialogue into an Apache dance between man and wife, a game of chicken between lovers. In Fifty Words, a Brooklyn brownstone becomes a battleground for architect Adam and his wife Jan, alone together with their young son off at his first sleepover. What the Night is For dramatizes Adam’s infidelity at a hotel with schoolteacher Melinda, a former lover he reunites with while working out of town. In Side Effects, we get the other side of the affair, as Melinda hashes it out with her husband Hugh, a Midwestern businessman.

Michael Weller has written over forty dramatic works, including the plays Moonchildren, Fishing, Loose Ends, and his most recent, Beast, and the films for Hair and Ragtime. His work has been widely produced throughout the country and internationally.