Craig Lucas

This collection brings back into print one of Craig Lucas’ best known and enduring works, Prelude to a Kiss, which was both a hit on Broadway and a popular motion picture. Missing Persons, an updated version of Lucas’ first play, is also included in the collection, along with Three Postcards, an offbeat and uniquely imaginative free form musical play.

Prelude to a Kiss
“It is rare to find a play so suffused with sorrow that sends one home so high.” –Frank Rich, New York Times
“Lucas zaps you into a fantasy land with thoughtfulness and buoyant grace. A sensitive meditation on immortality, commitment and the mysteries of the heart.” –Seattle Times
“Absolutely charming and immediately endearing…a fairy-tale adventure into the human heart.” –The News-Harold

Missing Persons
“An expressly theatrical, resonant metaphor for the way memory can cripple. What Lucas does so well is find a uniquely whimsical expression for the cataclysmic menace and hostility lurking in the prose of everyday life.” –New York Times
“A truly intelligent play, one that is literary and heartfelt and beautifully written, a dramatic rarity in these or any times.” –New York Post

Three Postcards
“Understated and minimalist in style, the play blends casual dialog, clever lyrics and warmly melodic music to explore the inner thoughts and tensions of its characters.” –New York Daily News
“Gertrude Stein would have enjoyed this one.” –New Yorker


Craig Lucas is a playwright, screenwriter and director. His plays include Prelude to a Kiss, Reckless, Blue Window, God’s Heart, The Singing Forest and Small Tragedy. His screenplays include Longtime Companion, The Secret Lives of Dentists and The Dying Gaul, which he also directed. Mr. Lucas’ awards include the L.A. Drama Critics Award, an OBIE Award for Best Play and Best Director, and the Excellence in Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

"Irresistible . . . intoxicating. . . . Enduringly original sensibility."—New York Times

Adele is a painter and an addict. Through her eyes, we meet her two lovers, Mala and Bill, and follow her destructive relationships over the course of fourteen years. A vulnerable exploration of the interplay between art, love, and addiction, Ode to Joy is an affecting new drama from respected playwright Craig Lucas.

Renowned playwright Craig Lucas's newest work is a sensitive look at illness, addiction, and love.

Craig Lucas's plays include Missing Persons, Reckless, Blue Window, Prelude to a Kiss, God's Heart, The Dying Gaul, Stranger, Small Tragedy, Prayer for My Enemy, The Singing Forest, and the book for the The Light in the Piazza (music and lyrics by Adam Guettel).

“Prayer for My Enemy dares to ask smart and hard questions about a homegrown violence that reaches from suburban backyards into the battlefields of Iraq… Mr. Lucas is one of the theater’s most probing and poetic characters of the sinister undertow that pulses beneath daily American life.” –Ben Brantley, New York Times

“A multilayered, deeply unsettling and beautifully conceived new work.” –Linda Winer, Newsday

Craig Lucas “can masterfully distill a world of hurt and perplexity into complicated relations and single, pithy lines” (The Seattle Times), which is never more evident than in his latest play of public and private turmoil in today’s America. In Prayer for My Enemy we meet the Noone family: son Billy returns from Iraq, his pregnant sister Marianne marries Billy’s friend and former lover Tad, and his mother Karen tries to keep her husband Austin from falling off the wagon—all while the Red Sox and Yankees battle for the 2004 pennant. With Prayer for My Enemy, Lucas returns to the dark territory he has explored with earlier works, “bringing light and craft to previously unlit corners,” and illuminating the ways he is “one of the American theater’s best writers” (Variety).

Craig Lucas is a playwright, screenwriter and director. His plays include Prelude to a Kiss, Reckless, Blue Window, God’s Heart, The Singing Forest and Small Tragedy. His screenplays include Longtime Companion, The Secret Lives of Dentists and The Dying Gaul, which he also directed. Mr. Lucas’ awards include the L.A. Drama Critics Award, an OBIE Award for Best Play and Best Director, and the Excellence in Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The men and women of Craig Lucas’s plays abandon their illusions of safety and bravely enter wonderlands full of strangeness, cruelty and compassion. Equally attentive to the smallest details of human behavior and to the wellsprings of isolation and hope that inform it, Lucas’s lyrical precision creates timeless works of tragedy for the 21st century. This collection includes:

Reckless
"A perkily told sad story of a runaway waif-woman in the wide, wild world, Reckless remains a beguilingly sneaky crash course in the loss of innocence…When [Lucas] is at his best, and Reckless definitely qualifies as that, no one can beat him at plying cartoon cuteness to probe the fears that keep grownups awake at night.” –Ben Brantley, New York Times
“A satiric fantasy… this comic odyssey, which is as dark as it is hilarious, is as wonderful and indelible as anything Frank Capra could have imagined.” –Stark Insider
“Reckless is a slickly warm, yet zany dark comedy, often lying just on the borders of the mundane. Characters and situations seem to exist as if in a waking dream, just a heartbeat away from dissolving into nothingness and making you wonder whether they ever really existed at all.” –Talkin’ Broadway

Blue Window
“Blue Window…has something of the clarity of a Mozart quintet. It’s light, but it also seems to shed light. It’s clear, but it suggests mysteries. And it’s faultlessly spun.” –Dan Sullivan, Los Angeles Times
“Lucas identifies with his most victimized characters; the absurd comedy that permeates most of these works is the result of a victim's paranoid sense of humor.” –Chicago Reader

Stranger
“Crackling! Stranger has powerful heights of excitement…it’s the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a collision that sends off sparks.” –Michael Feingold, Village Voice
“The ever-questing author of Prelude to a Kiss and The Dying Gaul here presents an extreme portrait of a couple that suggests that at the heart of all relationships are the urges to torture and be hurt. Whatever role you choose, it seems, there is fear and loathing in love, much of it self-directed.” –Ben Brantley, New York Times
“Chill-inducing! A stranger play than Stranger we are not likely to see anytime soon… There is a breathtaking fearlessness to Lucas’ writing here.” –Variety

Craig Lucas is a playwright, screenwriter and director. His plays include Prelude to a Kiss, Reckless, Blue Window, God’s Heart, The Singing Forest and Small Tragedy. His screenplays include Longtime Companion, The Secret Lives of Dentists and The Dying Gaul, which he also directed. Mr. Lucas’ awards include the L.A. Drama Critics Award, an OBIE Award for Best Play and Best Director, and the Excellence in Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Winner of six Tony Awards

“A wondrous fable that is as simple and complicated as its ineffable subject—love. The Light in the Piazza has ravishing power. It’s as if Guettel were determined to capture the golden light of Tuscany in a bottle. His lyrics are remarkable, and the book, written by Craig Lucas, is written with characteristic empathy and humor. Brilliant.” –Frank Rich

“The Light in the Piazza beautifully captures the eternal allure of Italy. . . . The story wraps itself around your heart.”—Chicago Sun-Times

“Sumptuous and romantic. Guettel’s music and lyrics represent a genuine expense of spirit. The Light in the Piazza offers a complex contemplation of the well-defended emptiness of every man and woman. It doesn’t want theatergoers to feel good; it wants to make them feel deeply. And it does.” –New Yorker

Composer Adam Guettel, best known for his Floyd Collins, has teamed with Prelude to a Kiss playwright Craig Lucas to create a passionate and soaring new musical. Based on Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novella, The Light in the Piazza is the story of a young American woman whose chance encounter with a charming young Italian man in a Florentine piazza sets off a whirlwind romance, with an unsettling revelation.


Craig Lucas is a playwright, screenwriter and director. His plays include Prelude to a Kiss, Reckless, Blue Window, God’s Heart, The Singing Forest and Small Tragedy. His screenplays include Longtime Companion, The Secret Lives of Dentists and The Dying Gaul, which he also directed. Mr. Lucas’ awards include the L.A. Drama Critics Award, an OBIE Award for Best Play and Best Director, and the Excellence in Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Adam Guettel is a composer/lyricist living in Seattle, where he is Artist in Residence at the Intiman Theatre. His other work includes Floyd Collins and Saturn Returns (recorded by Nonesuch Records as Myths and Hymns). Mr. Guettel’s awards include the Stephen Sondheim Award, the ASCAP New Horizons Award, and the American Composers Orchestra Award.

“God’s Heart is a play which dares to say very ugly things from a very moral place, which risks censure in an effort to reach an ugly truth; a play that’s wise to its own inescapable shortcomings and addresses them as part of its subject; a play which ought to have been greeted with exhilaration and joy, for it courageously refuses restraint and risks everything to live up to its impossible-to-live-up-to title.” –Tony Kushner, Civilization Magazine
“Best American play of the year! The Dying Gaul is Craig Lucas’s best work by far. This powerful parable jolts us with questions and doesn't insult us with answers.” –Donald Lyons, Wall Street Journal
“The Dying Gaul is a fascinating new play! Even more theatrically imaginative and engaging than Prelude to a Kiss! Craig Lucas is writing better than ever these days.” –Vincent Canby, New York Times

This volume contains two of Craig Lucas’s most powerful and provocative full-length plays—God’s Heart and The Dying Gaul—with a suite of nine one-act plays. Together they illustrate the remarkable range and scope of a truly original American playwright.

Other plays in this collection include:
What I Meant Was
Unmemorable
Throwing Your Voice
Grief
The Boom Box
Bad Dream
If Columbus Does Not Figure in Your Travel Plans
Boyfriend Riff
Credo