Mimesophobia or Before and After
Play Description
They seemed like the perfect couple. Attractive. Well-educated. Affluent. Why did the husband brutally murder his wife and take his own life? Aaron and Henry, two young wannabe screenwriters at a writer's retreat struggle with crippling blocks as they seek to solve the mystery. Shawn, an academic teetering on the edge of insanity grapples with her own possible involvement in the killing, while writing a book about America’s obsession with violence. Meanwhile, the murder victim's sister attempts to reconstruct the truth from the ashes of her late sister's diary, becoming a celebrity in the process. What really happened that violent night, and will any of them come close to uncovering the truth?
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
“MIMESOPHOBIA [is] defined as ‘the morbid fear of slavish imitation’ … The work is framed as a reality TV show, documentary reenactment, description of a film script and a murder mystery all rolled into a 100-minute show. The result is a theatrical exercise that is an intelligent, funny, satirical look into the American obsession with violence. Our voyeuristic instincts make murder and the cult of celebrity into a fun spectator sport that we can’t get enough of. MIMESOPHOBIA unravels as part murder mystery, part reality TV show, with a glimpse into the creation of a film. Playwright Murillo structures much of the work using a film script description complete with camera shot directions. This effectively paints the action in our minds eye as it evokes humor and wit from the camera point of view. The work dodges between Hollywood and Hyde Park Chicago as it tracks one family’s tragedy … The work demands our full attention as it moves briskly between forms to tell the story. Sprinkles of wit, satire and raw humor propel this challenging work … This provocative play has many levels of meaning that contain cautionary elements about contemporary entertainment.” —Tom Williams, Chicago Critic
“Funny, provocative, and poignant, MIMESOPHOBIA is a huge success … and one of the more refreshing plays to land this season.” —Scotty Zacher, Chicago Theater Beat
Author(s)
Carlos MurilloCarlos Murillo is a Chicago based playwright, director, and educator. He is the author of THE JAVIER PLAYS, a trilogy published by 53rd State Press that includes DIAGRAM OF A PAPER AIRPLANE, A THICK DESCRIPTION OF HARRY SMITH and YOUR NAME WILL FOLLOW YOU HOME. His play DARK PLAY OR STORIES FOR BOYS premiered at the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2007, and has been produced widely throughout the US and Europe. In New York his work has been seen at P73, Repertorio Español, The NYC Summer Play Festival, En Garde Arts, Soho Rep, and The Public. In Chicago, his work has been seen at Steppenwolf, the Goodman, Collaboraction, Adventure Stage, Theatre Seven, and Walkabout Theatre. He is the recipient of a 2015 Doris Duke Impact Award. Other awards include: the Frederick Loewe Award from New Dramatists, the Met Life/Nuestros Voces Award from Repertorio Español, the Otis Guernsey Award from the William Inge Theatre Festival, two National Latino Playwriting Award from Arizona Theatre Company, and a Jerome Fellowship from The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. An alumnus of New Dramatists, he currently heads the Playwriting Program at The Theatre School of DePaul University in Chicago. He lives in the south side of Chicago with his wife, Lisa Portes, and their two children, Eva Rose and Carlos Pablo.
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 commissioned by South Coast Rep
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
Related Plays
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Subtitled “A History of Science (A Chronicle of Folly, Wisdom, and Madness),” PORT TWILIGHT has been described as “an end-times extraterrestrial vaudeville.”
Production Info
Cast: 12 total (6 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 85 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
A masterpiece by one of the greatest writers of the Spanish Golden Age. When the people of the town of Fuente Ovejuna revolt against their tyrannical overlord and murder him, the authorities attempt to find out who is responsible, leading to one of the most memorable acts of resistance in world drama.
Production Info
Cast: 16 total (4 female, 12 male, flexible casting up to 8 women and 20 men)Full Length Drama (about 180 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
A fantastical “Kafkaesque” journey through time and space.
Production Info
Cast: 12 total (6 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
FIVE OF US deals with the parallel lives of New York tenement dwellers, who live next door to each other but whose paths do not cross until one fateful moment, which spells disaster for them all. One apartment is occupied by Mark, a young writer who churns out pornography while planning the “big novel” he will someday write, and his live-in girlfriend, Lee, an anthropology grad who works as a waitress. Their next-door neighbor is Herman, a mentally deficient messenger who speaks in a language all his own and amuses himself by calling 800 numbers to make hotel reservations he has no intention of keeping. When Lee is offered a chance to join an anthropological expedition to Sri Lanka, Mark is faced with a crisis — the loss of both her companionship and her income. With the connivance of his ex-con buddy, Eddie, a street-smart would-be mercenary, Mark decides to prop up his finances by robbing Herman's apartment, in the misguided belief that the poor eccentric has been hoarding money. But, instead, what they find is the bizarre detritus of a stunted life — a life which is abruptly ended when Herman, coming upon them, is startled into a fatal epileptic fit. Fearful and guilt-ridden, Mark and Eddie try to cover their tracks — but as the play ends it is also clear that no matter how far or fast they flee they will never escape the spectre of the lonely misfit whose pathetic world they have so thoughtlessly and fatally shattered.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Midway through Albert Camus's The Stranger, an Arab is killed. Leaping from this moment and working backwards through possible histories of tangled romance, ethnic conflict, and random violence, Betty Shamieh has crafted a play inspired by this unnamed character. Infused with elements of Middle Eastern oral storytelling traditions and set in French Algiers on the brink of revolution, THE STRANGEST is an absurdist murder mystery about three Algerian brothers who vie for the love of the same woman. Their bitter rivalry ends with one brother being inexplicably gunned down by a French stranger.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (2 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Uncle Sam was a novelties salesman who died one night, alone and broke, in a Pittsburgh hotel. But he was also a larger-than-life figure, a mythic hero, to his nephew — who now seeks to discover his uncle's true story. His quest is a quixotic and picaresque one, involving a seductive nightclub singer who promises to marry Sam if he can locate his ne'er-do-well brother (who absconded with the proceeds from a robbery), and developing into a series of sometimes funny, sometimes hair-raising episodes as the nephew “becomes” his uncle in his youth and journeys to a remote lighthouse, a rather sinister university laboratory, an opium den, the clinic of a Mexican quack, and a very odd miniature golf course — all intriguingly distorted, as though viewed through a funhouse mirror. In the end it is really the landscape of the mind that is explored and illuminated, as the trail leads back to Old Sam and the disquieting knowledge that dreams and reality are, in the final essence, often one and the same, with the “truth” still remaining tantalizingly out of reach.
Production Info
Cast: 11 total (5 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
Pony up, America! Equestria is a land of friendship. Equestria is a land of magic. Equestria is Ben’s apartment in rural Pennsylvania. Every Tuesday night, Ben hosts “The Rust Belt Ponies Meet-Up Group for Adult Fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.” Sharing fun with these friends is a wonderful place to be. After all, nothing bad can happen in Equestria … But when an ominous neighborhood watch brigade starts patrolling the streets, fear and paranoia creep into the circle of friendship. The outside world is turning more violent and authoritarian, and it is sucking our heroes into an entirely different story. A timely new comedy that explores the rise of a new social order and how the currents of history, normalization, and fear can sweep up even the most generous bronies.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Part murder mystery, part unrequited romance, and part absurdist debacle about the denial and transcendence of death, TRANSATLANTICA tells the story of Dr Reginald Reinhold, whose psychoanalytic session with an eccentric patient, Ilyria (of the land of Ilyria), is interrupted by his wife with news that she is dying. By coincidence, Ilyria too is dying, as is every subsequent visitor to his home — a parade of increasingly eccentric guests. With death dancing at every door, Dr Reinhold is forced to confront his own peculiar relationship with mortality. The setting is the parlor of Dr Reinhold's mansion (festooned with mythical taxidermy and curious artifacts) on the shores of the fantastic continent of Transatlantica, a topsy-turvy world where gardens are planted with cake and lovers grow into trees.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
M and G's new apartment is nothing special — it really could be any generic New York City apartment — but they're hoping it's a place of healing, a new beginning after a traumatic encounter with a former friend. Unfortunately, the previous tenant of this apartment isn't a man who likes to let go … and he wasn't ready to move out. First, it's little things: their mail disappears, it feels like someone's watching them, he stops by occasionally just to say hi and see what they've done with the place. But soon, when G is called out of town for business, M is left alone, and before they know it, they wake up to find themselves immobilized and watching as the previous tenant begins to make the apartment his own again.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (2 female, 1 male, 2 actors may be male or female or nonbinary)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
A brilliantly conceived and highly theatrical experience in absurdist drama, in which the audience is taken on a wild and funny metaphysical journey into the fertile imaginations of the diverse characters whose bizarre stories are deftly interwoven into the fabric of the play. DARK RIDE is comprised of a series of vignettes involving characters who, at first, appear to bear no relation to each other. A mysterious figure gives a scholar an ancient manuscript to translate; a thief steals an enormous jewel; a woman assures us that life is all coincidence; a dream-like waitress serves her customers all manner of thoughts and suggestions but no food. The images are bizarrely funny and provocative and, in time, coalesce into a pattern of driving concerns and obsessions that come into focus when the various characters finally meet at an oculists convention in Mexico City. Phantasmagoric, the play takes us on a journey that, in the final essence, transcends the physical world to explore the inner recesses of the mind.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (4 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
HICKORYDICKORY explores what would happen if we all had an internal clock telling us the time of our death. Someone has tinkered with Cari Lee’s mortal clock, so she’s stuck at 17 for eternity. Now she’s the same age as her daughter, Dale. But Dale’s worried about her own mortal clock — the one that tells her the day and time she’ll die. Dad’s an expert clock-smith, but some timepieces are not meant to be tampered with.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 150 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Winner 2018 Stage Raw Award for Playwriting
Play Description
TIME ALONE traces the parallel journeys of a young man convicted of killing a gang rival and a woman whose son — a police officer — is murdered in the line of duty. Both end up in places of extreme loneliness: a solitary confinement prison cell and the silent house of the bereaved. As time itself seems to unravel, their tales both contrast and mirror each other, providing answers to each other's questions — until they find new doors to life.
Production Info
Cast: 2 total (1 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 105 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes