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 writer, actor, and director living in Dallas, Texas. Matt's plays have been produced across the U.S. His plays THE BOXER, HELLO HUMAN FEMALE, BARBECUE APOCALYPSE and BIG SCARY ANIMALS all garnered DFW Theater Critics Forum Awards for "Outstanding New Play" and BARBECUE APOCALYPSE was nominated for an American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg New Play Award. Matt has been commissioned by Theatre Three, Dallas Theater Center and Audacity Theatre Lab. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Playwrights' Center and was honored as the 2018 Distinguished Alum of the Stephen F. Austin State University School of Theatre.
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
Production Stills
Upcoming and Recent Productions
Professional
Nonprofessional
Related Plays
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
A THOUSAND YEARS is a fantastical comicbook-bright flight of fancy through time examining the enduring power of love. After a terrible accident, Miriam’s husband David falls into a coma. Miriam leaves the hospital to clear her head and is abducted. She spends the next 1,000 years trying to get back to David. Obstacle after obstacle abound. At some point Miriam realizes she has one true enemy — the evil She Doctor. The She Doctor may or may not be Fate, Nature and/or Time. She meets many allies along the way. Like Jackson, a hermit who lives in a lighthouse and Nella who lost her girlfriend 500 years earlier and is lost at sea. To save David, Miriam must engage in a battle of the soul with the She Doctor. But can she win?
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
POST MORTEM is set in the not-too-distant future when the Christian Right holds power. Alice, a lowly lecturer in drama at a faith-based state university in the Midwest, and Dexter, an enthusiastic student more interested in his teacher than the theatre, become embroiled in the discovery of a play by an obscure late 20th century playwright named A R Gurney. When the authorities destroy the script, these two must piece together the play and with it the future of the world gone mad.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (2 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Christmas Eve. New York City. An aspiring writer and a struggling actress meet while looking at the famous holiday windows, and the characters in the displays come to life and look back at them, including a lecherous elf with eyes for Mrs. Claus; Scrooge and Tiny Tim arguing about being portrayed as zombies; a street-wise Little Match Girl; Jim from “The Gift of the Magi” enjoying his wife’s new androgynous haircut; and a jealous Joseph The Carpenter. A smart, sweet, slightly twisted holiday romantic comedy.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male, flexible casting, up to 17 actors)Full Length Comedy (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
In the early 1950s, a psychologist sets out to write the definitive book on THE SEX HABITS OF AMERICAN WOMEN. Meanwhile, his wife is having an affair with his former student, his daughter can’t find love, and all his theories refuse to go unchallenged. Juxtaposed to the action in the 1950s is a present-day videographer making a documentary on precisely the same subject.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (5 female, 3 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
The story of a dysfunctional circus in which a fortuneteller has wrested control of the circus from her ringmaster. Beasts and dark shapes never seen on earth come forth to present, or disrupt, their acts. Until an absent clown, or child, finally comes back to lead the circus’s opening parade.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (5 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
García Lorca's passionate, lyrical tale of longing and revenge: a twentieth-century masterpiece.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (7 female, 3 male, bit parts)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Set in a dystopic future, in a culture of fear, where the trees are being stripped and burned and ashes rain from the sky, a family deals with the aftermath of a woman being swallowed by the sea. With the proper ID card, safety is right next door. But if not in this life, then in the next.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (5 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Susan is a career woman with a seemingly perfect life, complete with sensitive husband and a brand new bundle of joy on the way. Beginning at the moment a very pregnant Susan goes into labor, the play follows her journey as she becomes a new mother, with a frighteningly inexplicable newborn to care for. Employing both realistic and surrealistic elements, BABY’S BLUES explores one woman’s descent into postpartum depression, but also brings into focus the difficult challenge of becoming a mother for the first time, as well as the fine line that sometimes exists between health and madness.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (5 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play 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
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
In the future, after the global ecological disaster, so much that makes life worth living has been outlawed. One family refuses to submit. Will their small act of rebellion lead to a future where science no longer dominates humanity but serves it?
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (4 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 110 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play 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