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
Burned-out actor Hugh Pendleton, not-so-fresh from playing Scrooge one too many times in the backwater community theatre where his once promising career has met its unglamorous end, is surprised to encounter three spirits of his own in this quirky and compelling ode to the holiday classic.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male, flexible casting, up to 17 actors)Full Length Comedy (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
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
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Ghosts drift through Strindberg's haunted and haunting dreamscape where a student idealizes the inhabitants of a stylish Stockholm apartment building, only to discover that their lives, perhaps even life itself, may be a kind of hell from which salvation can only be achieved through suffering.
Production Info
Cast: 14 total (7 female, 7 male, bit parts)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
An industrialist in the near future utilizes every means possible to get an inventor to sign over his revolutionary creation that will inevitably change the world. Corporate greed never met creative angst with such dramatic and hilarious results.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)Full Length Comedy (about 90 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
Offbeat drama of a mother, father, and adult daughter living together inside an upscale Manhattan apartment. Daughter plays a cello and has a personality disorder. Her alter ego seduces her father who is a political media guru. Mother is conflicted in how to stop this awful charade.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (2 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
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
$11.95–$15.00 Play 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–$15.95 Play Description
A time-bending love story between two physicists. Described by The Chicago Sun-Times as “a deft little romantic screwball comedy with a very brainy twist. It brings to mind some of Tom Stoppard's more intellectual theatrical hijinks. But it's also the kind of work that might have beguiled such 1930s and '40s era film directors as Frank Capra and Preston Sturges, who probably would have hired Albert Einstein as a script consultant.”
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (1 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
Electricity is the central metaphor and expressive image in this unusual love story which takes place in an electrical repair shop.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (1 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
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