cover art by Bruce McLeod
cover design by Lisa Govan
IN THE HEART OF AMERICA AND OTHER PLAYS
NAOMI WALLACE
The five full-length plays in this collection are:
IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
SLAUGHTER CITY
THE WAR BOYS
THE TRESTLE AT POPE LICK CREEK
(play descriptions below)
IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
"IN THE HEART OF AMERICA is a pretty startling piece of writing. It has the driving political anger and entwining of the personal and political that marked some of the best British writing of the early seventies, the vigor and mystical overtones of raw Sam Shepard, and the grace and sensuality of a poet....
The landscape here is the barren, burned-out emptiness of history's war zones, and the talk is relentlessly of death and destruction. But there is also love."
Lyn Gardner, The Guardian (London)
SLAUGHTER CITY
"It's not just the blood-spattered slaughterhouse setting that makes the Royal Shakespeare Company's SLAUGHTER CITY an unusually meaty (you'll forgive the expression) new play. Aligning issues of class and race and labor dynamics to a surrealist aesthetic as elusive as her politics are straightforward, American writer Naomi Wallace shows a willingness to embrace topics once treated by the likes of Clifford Odets and Sophie Treadwell.
These days, such terrain is left to the movies--Paul Schrader's `Blue Collar', among others--but the pulse of Wallace's writing is of and for the theater. Hers may not be the most audience-friendly of voices, but even her opacity commands attention."
Matt Wolf, Variety
"Naomi Wallace's SLAUGHTER CITY, which gets its premiere in The Pit, is a strange and compelling play that unties two elements in the American tradition--the radical and the mystic. If it reminds me of anyone it is the Walt Whitman who wrote of `the audacity of freedom' and the need for America to free itself from the anti-democratic European past.
One the radical level, the play is a passionate protest against exploitation....
...the play has passion, poetry and a wild strangeness. Wallace also writes highly effective individual scenes....
Most cheering of all is Wallace's adventurous attempt to redefine political drama in terms of a feminist surrealism."
Michael Billington, The Guardian
THE WAR BOYS
"THE WAR BOYS, a vital three hander about the informal policing of the Mexican border in Texas by racially screwed-up, sadistic vigilantes."
James Christopher, Time Out
"Naomi Wallace is a young American writer whose first play, THE WAR BOYS, was an authoritative appropriation of male experience."
The Observer Review (review of SLAUGHTER CITY)
Published by T C G
ISBN: 1-55936-186-7; $17.95