Really and Other Plays
Description
A collection of sharp, innovative plays by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Fairview.
Jackie Sibblies Drury has established herself as a bold and formally innovative writer whose work upends expectations of what theater can be and should do. Her layered, complex plays deftly explore the ways in which the white gaze works to reduce and marginalize Black lives.
This new collection gathers three of her plays: Really; Social Creatures; and We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915. In these works, comedy and tragedy hover side by side as the personal meets the political and the past meets the present. Each work is a reckoning, both with the looming specter of history, but also with the performative and fractured self.
Reviews
“At turns funny and unsettling, Sibblies Drury's play-within-a-play [We Are Proud to Present…] gently lampoons actors' tendency to let their own self-awareness and self-importance eclipse all else. In the wrong hands, this approach might have resulted in a broad and cliched skewering of easy actor targets, but there's a keen subtlety at work in both the performances and in Sibblies Drury's writing.”
- Gothamist
“Jackie Sibblies Drury’s sharp script for Social Creatures powers the best production of a new play I’ve seen in a long time. This tense and gory tragicomedy, debuting at Trinity Rep, avoids so many pitfalls of both new plays and zombie drama. It creates a credible atmosphere of real danger, both physically and emotionally, and Drury uses the threat to effectively explore what we lose as a society when we lose intimacy.”
- New England Theatre Geek
“Minimalist, stylized dialogue like this risks becoming irritating, but Drury knows just how much to leave to our imagination. Her scenes and exchanges [in Really] are rich with repressed emotion, so even if the talk of the characters doesn’t make logical sense, there is plenty of compelling resonance.”
- The Arts Fuse
“We Are Proud… impressively navigates the tricky boundaries that separate art and life, the haunted present and the haunting historical past.”
- New York Times
“In her brilliant Social Creatures, now in its inaugural run at Trinity Rep, Drury has us laughing through tears as she takes on capitalism, racism and the changing world order.”
- Providence Journal
“Ms. Drury’s three-character drama [Really] may tackle issues commonly debated in aesthetic philosophy seminars, but its tone is never academic.”
- New York Times
“[Really is] a play that updates European absurdist techniques to take aim at liberal America's great existential troubles: race and gender.”
- Bomb Magazine