Dead City
by Sheila Callaghan

Name: Dead City
Brand: Sheila Callaghan
SKU: 9780573652349
Rating: 3.75 (20 reviews)

Highlights

Female

Male

90 mins Present Day Ensemble Cast Unit Set/Multiple Settings Contemporary Costumes/Street Clothes Comedy

Synopsis

It's June 16, 2004. Samantha Blossom, a chipper woman in her 40s, wakes up one June morning in her Upper East Side apartment to find her life being narrated over the airwaves of public radio.

She discovers in the mail an envelope addressed to her husband from his lover, which spins her raw and untethered into an odyssey through the city.... a day full of chance encounters, coincidences, a quick love affair, and a fixation on the mysterious Jewel Jupiter.

Jewel, the young but damaged poet genius, eventually takes a shine to Samantha and brings her on a midnight tour of the meat-packing district which changes Samantha's life forever—or doesn't.

This 90 minute comic drama is a modernized, gender-reversed, relocated, hyper-theatrical riff on the novel Ulysses, occurring exactly 100 years to the day after Joyce's jaunt through Dublin.

Press Reviews

"Wonderful... Sheila Callaghan's pleasingly witty and theatrical new drama that is a love letter to New York masquerading as hate mail...[Callaghan] writes with a world-weary tone and has a poet's gift for economical description. The entire dead city comes alive..."
— The New York Times

"Dead City, Sheila Callaghan's riff on James Joyce's Ulysses is stylish, lyrical, fascinating, occasionally irritating, and eminently worthwhile... the kind of work that is thoroughly invigorating."
— Backstage

Characters

Character	Gender	Age	Description
Jewel female, 22, undernourished, broody, bad teeth, a poet and intellectual	female	—	female, 22, undernourished, broody, bad teeth, a poet and intellectual
Gabriel/ Hank/ Homeless Man/ Sam One male, mid-forties, sexy-as-hell	male	—	male, mid-forties, sexy-as-hell
Beatrice/ Woman One/ Nora/ Sam Two female, mid-late twenties, bull-like, loud, hot shit	female	—	female, mid-late twenties, bull-like, loud, hot shit
Hendra/ Rosalind/ Gloria/ Piper/ A.A.M./ Sam Three female, mid-thirites, sharp, together, very stylish	female	—	female, mid-thirites, sharp, together, very stylish
Voice/ Man One/ Jacob/ Woman Two/ Sam Four/ Cabbie male, 45-44, somewhat crusty and lecherous	male	45-44	male, 45-44, somewhat crusty and lecherous
Child/ Young Man/ Erik/ Waiter/ Sam Five male, mid-twenties an adorable boyish young man	male	—	male, mid-twenties an adorable boyish young man
Samantha female, mid-forties, optimistic, cheery, round, good-natured, attractive	female	—	female, mid-forties, optimistic, cheery, round, good-natured, attractive