Play 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

Play 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

Play Description

A kaleidoscopic, surrealistic overview of contemporary America, set forth in the bizarre, highly theatrical style which characterizes this writer's distinctive voice. Produced by New York's highly regarded Public Theater, the play employs brilliantly imaginative avante-garde techniques to highlight both the dreams — and delusions — which infuse and motivate our modern world. The play is made up of a series of concurrent actions, some set in a tacky motel, some elsewhere, involving a group of disparate but curiously related people. There is the young night clerk, Pauline, who studies her high-school English Lit notebook, while growing increasingly fearful of the unseen and unwanted suitor who lies in wait in the motel parking lot; a raucous carnival barker touting his giant crocodile, Bonecrusher; a pair of seedy bar denizens who occasionally break into song; a dim-witted handyman, Chuckles, who performs pointless errands; a deranged scientist who believes that he is in contact with creatures from outer space; an abandoned woman who waits restlessly for a lover who will probably never return; and a mysterious drifter, Faber, who, somehow becomes the catalyst which fuses all these divergent elements into a cohesive, and often wildly funny whole. And, in so doing, makes the play both an encapsulation of the American myth and, at the same time, a telling comment on what is right — and wrong — with this myth.

Production Info