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From the author of the viral phenomenon The Roommate comes a literary horror novel following a young playwright who conjures up a true tragedy through a Machiavellian curse when spurned by her mentor.
Enter COREY, a passionate young nobody, and her professor, MAXINE, an award-winning playwright and living legend of the American theatre. When Maxine shatters Corey's dreams of artistic collaboration after graduation, Corey seeks revenge. At a clairvoyant's den in a violet-lit Dallas strip mall, the young playwright unleashes a life-altering curse on Maxine.
Possessed by dark powers and even darker ambitions, Corey follows Maxine to a prestigious playwriting residency in Chicago where the women become fatally entwined. Through three acts, two interludes, and one curse, Corey pushes her mentor toward theatre's haunted margins, where reality begins to crumble.
Caroline Macon Fleischer's A Play About A Curse reads like an A24 film. Part psychological horror and part theatrical fever dream, Curse shadows a heroine-turned-villain as she confronts the supernatural power struggle between mentor and protégé, learning that to achieve our dreams, someone else must suffer a nightmare.
“With precise storytelling and a wild blending of forms, Caroline Macon Fleischer amplifies the envy, pride, wrath, and lust bubbling beneath creative collaboration. A Play About A Curse swims through both the psychological acuity of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise and the sinister chill of Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline on its way toward deeper and stranger waters.” —Martin Seay, author of The Mirror Thief
"A Play About A Curse brilliantly showcases Macon’s gifts as both a novelist and a playwright. It's a gripping hybrid narrative about ambition, betrayal, and jealousy, encouraging us to contemplate the timeless question: 'What good is it to gain the whole world but lose our very soul?'" —Loy A. Webb, Playwright of The Light
“In the dust of an old building, the floorboards vibrate, a curtain draws, a scrim passes over, and out slips Caroline Macon Fleischer’s genre-agnostic novel, A Play About A Curse. Insidious mentor-mentee relationships take center stage, trading a theatre of absolution for some psychotic bliss. Macon Fleischer probes the question, ‘What happens when we become the object of our own contempt?’ Heralded by the author’s hallucinogenic prose and cutting dialogue, this is a story of players cleaved from a worldly realm, flung from their obsessions, chasing the myths of their own making.” —Lucas Baisch, Playwright
“A Play About A Curse is as propulsive as it is sui generis. Macon Fleischer’s ability to crawl inside the unraveling brain of its narrator creates a journey so addictive the reader becomes an actor in the play, which is as much about envy as it is about a descent into madness.” —Eliza Bent, Writer and Performer