Barbecue Apocalypse
Play Description
Three couples gather on the back deck of a very modest suburban home for a mid-summer barbecue where the hosts, Mike and Deb, struggle with feelings of inadequacy about their home decor, their clothes, their careers, their culinary skills, and pretty much everything else. Ash is a successful yuppy with impeccable taste but annoys the hell out of his wife, Lulu, who likes to get very drunk, very quickly. Win mistakes his obnoxious confidence for charm, and his new girlfriend, Glory, is just too young and beautiful to be tolerated by other women. Throughout the first act feelings are hurt over the difference between “Organic” and “All Natural” beef, who's pregnant and who's just put on a little weight, and a nearly crippling iPhone addiction. The superficial, neuroses-laden interpersonal squabbles bubble over to a flash of inept violence when Win makes what we learn is just one in a series of passes at Deb. As the act closes, the group discovers that the rest of the world has been literally falling apart during their little, terrible barbecue. Act Two takes place on the same deck for another barbecue to celebrate their one-year post-apocalypsiversary. In a year where the only way to measure success is survival, roles have reversed, and we explore how each character's basic nature has allowed them to adapt and thrive or has pushed them to the brink of extinction.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
- Production Stills
- Productions
Press Quotes
“The vast reservoir of pop culture Lyle mines to create dialogue that is both realistic and stylized reveals a kind of Aspergery love of language that’s hard to overpraise. The play isn’t laden with jokes so much as a way of saying things with hilarious understatement. You may want to see it twice just to hear all the lines you missed the first time.” —Arnold Wayne Jones, Dallas Voice
“It could have been enough for Lyle to set the entire play at this awkward, weird, and painfully honest barbecue; he still would have ended up with an engaging lark that’s sitcom-funny. But then he decides to end the world.” —Lyndsey Wilson, D Magazine
“BARBECUE APOCALYPSE is a tasty nine-layer dip of comedy commentary about the slippery matters of marriage, adult friendships and career failure (real or perceived).” —Elaine Liner, Dallas Observer
“A good comedy makes you laugh. A really good one makes you think. BARBECUE APOCALYPSE is a really good comedy.” —Nancy Churnin, Dallas Morning News
“A hilarious frenzy of existential angst.” —Martha Heimberg, TheaterJones.com
“BARBECUE APOCALYPSE suggests, in no uncertain terms, that these thoroughly average Americans were far more savage when they were sipping mango margaritas and failing to make small talk as compared to a year later when their new hobbies include devouring raccoons and threatening to stab electronic devices, among other acts defined as depraved by current standards of decorum.” —Kevin Greene, Chicago Stage Standard
Author(s)
Matt LyleOriginally from East Texas, Matt Lyle is a Summa Cum Laude graduate and winner of the Outstanding Theatre Graduate Award from Stephen F. Austin State University School of Theatre. He co-founded Bootstraps Comedy Theater in Dallas, Texas for which he continues to serve as Artistic Director. In 2007, The Dallas Observer named Bootstraps Best Small Theater Company and Matt Best New Playwright. Matt's plays have been produced in Dallas, Chicago, New York, Orlando and the University of Michigan. His plays THE BOXER, HELLO HUMAN FEMALE, and BARBECUE APOCALYPSE all garnered DFW Theater Critics Forum Awards for Best New Play and Barbecue Apocalypse was nominated for an American Theatre Critics Association/Steinberg New Play Award. Matt is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Playwright's Center.
Book Information
| Publisher | BPPI |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 12/6/2016 |
| Pages | 82 |
| ISBN | 9780881456851 |
Special Notes
If original stage producers credits appear in bold below, all licensees are required to include them in the following form on the title page in all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all advertising in which the full cast appears in size of type not less than ten percent (10%) of the size of the title of the Play:
Originally produced by Kitchen Dog Theater, Dallas, TX
In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypub.com
Upcoming and Recent Productions
Nonprofessional
Related Plays
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Arrogant young Puerto Rican Fatima, who works as a counter girl at a fast-food restaurant, has been arrested for the murder of 14 people, poisoned at her workplace. Young attorney Jeremy has been assigned to defend her and asks a Latina colleague, Maritza, to be his translator. But Fatima refuses to talk to anyone but Maritza, and she's enough of a manipulator to get her way. Fatima claims she has been blessed — or cursed — with psychic powers. By merely clasping the hand of an individual, she says, she can immediately grasp everything about him/her including past, future, and innermost secrets. She tells Maritza that her murders were mercy killings: She “read” each of her victims and killed them because they wanted to die. Maritza is first incredulous, then indignant at Fatima's playing God. She firmly resists letting Fatima clasp her hand, but Fatima is persuasive, constantly shifting from pugnacious, foul-mouthed street girl to wise and wily seductress to gentle, compassionate young woman. Maritza finally offers up her hand, yielding her secrets and placing her fate in Fatima's grasp.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$10.95–$15.00Play Description
In the second part of Tony Kushner's epic, the plague of AIDS worsens, relationships fall apart as new ones form, and unexpected friendships take form.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 220 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Three years after Josie’s mother died, no one expects her to telephone from a bus station in North Dakota. This comic study of love and letting go gives a look at the disparity between what you expect and what is delivered.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (4 female, 1 male)Full Length Comedy (about 85 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
EIGHT DAYS (BACKWARDS) travels in reverse order through the previous eight days in the lives of 13 urbanites as they navigate missed opportunities and surprise connections in pursuit of romance and revelation.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male, multiethnic cast)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$10.95–$15.00Play Description
This witty and passionate play explores the story of a man with Alzheimer's and at the same time turns into “a travel guide to Middle America conducted by aliens from outer space.” The play has a wonderful comic sensibility, but this is a chillingly painful play addressing postmodern society's collective nervous breakdown.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
In this unabashedly sentimental comedy, a cat named Samantha has just started living with a guy named Shuman who she believes is her true love. At first everything seems to be going great. Samantha can't get enough of Shuman, and she can't get enough of him. But soon Samantha realizes that Shuman doesn't always seem to understand her. Worse yet, Shuman doesn't always seem all that interested in trying to understand her. Things become truly problematic when one night Oscar, a sexy alley cat, shows up at the door. Suddenly Samantha begins to wonder whether she's an indoor or an outdoor cat. To make matters more complicated, a quirky aspiring cat therapist named Matilda inserts herself into the mix, thinking she can solve everyone's problems but only seems to make things worse. Eventually Samantha finds herself on a journey, both physical and emotional, that leads her to discover what having a home and being loved really mean to her. INDOOR/OUTDOOR is an allegory about the difficulties and joys of all manner of relationships.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Two American couples get caught in a chronological palindrome on a trip to Italy. Stigmata, alchemy, adultery, and St. Catherine of Siena’s severed head plague a nun and a minister in this circular love story that is a comedy if performed forward and a tragedy if performed backward.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$10.95–$15.00Play Description
This provocative chronicle, interspersed with fantasy sequences from Alice in Wonderland, traces the career of Charles Dodgson (better know as Lewis Carroll) from his first work on the immortal classic to his near downfall when accused of immorality.
Production Info
Cast: 11 total (4 female, 7 male, doubling)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
The year is 2010, the place an elite psychiatric clinic, the Patient #1 is — the ex-president, George W Bush!
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
A fabulist comedy-drama of a future city-state made up of Tijuana and San Diego after a great California earthquake. The world greets the first Mexican Pope who leads the region back into recovery.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (6 female, 4 male)Full Length Comedy (about 110 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Unmarried cousins Eleanor and Lolly have inherited from their recently deceased aunt a historical house on the windswept Massachusetts coast. Only thing is, the place is haunted by the handsome young ghost of a swashbuckling 19-century smuggler who was hanged for his crimes. The local minister, Mr Butts, finds it all unbearably romantic. Eleanor, a worldly woman, is skeptical of the ghost's existence, but spinsterish Lolly claims he visits her at night, and they've fallen in love. Has Lolly, Eleanor wonders, lost her mind? Moreover, how could the ghost possibly prefer Lolly to her? As the ghost continues his visitations, his reasons for the haunting are gradually revealed, and not only Lolly but even Eleanor and Mr Butts begin to fall under his spell, the surprising consequences of which may just land all three of them in jail in this delightful and otherworldly romantic comedy.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 110 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
When Monty's family moves from Louisiana to a large city in Southern California, he and his siblings encounter a dangerous landscape where cruelty thrives among their peers, offering little comfort from their abusive home life. This gripping drama embraces the good and evil young people face alone in their lives.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (4 female, 4 male, extras)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes