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"Guirgis, like other storytellers who explore the sacred and profane, is most interested in how grace transforms us."—The New Yorker
Written with humor, tenderness, grit, and wonderment by acclaimed playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, Between Riverside and Crazy is an extraordinary new play: a dark comedy about a man trying to maintain control as the world unravels around him.
City Hall is demanding more than his signature, the Landlord wants him out, the liquor store is closed, and the Church won't leave him alone. As ex-cop and recent widower Walter "Pops" Washington struggles to hold on to one of the last great rent-stabilized apartments on Riverside Drive, he must also contend with old wounds, new houseguests, and a final ultimatum. It seems the old days are dead and gone — after a lifetime living between Riverside and Crazy.
Stephen Adly Guirgis' other plays include The Motherfucker with the Hat, Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, Our Lady of 121st Street, In Arabia We'd All Be Kings, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, The Little Flower of East Orange, Den of Thieves, Race Religion Politics, and Dominica: The Fat Ugly Ho. His play Between Riverside and Crazy won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2015. He is a former co-artistic director of LABryinth Theater Company. He received the Yale Wyndham-Campbell Prize, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, a Whiting Award and a fellowship from TCG in 2004.
“Guirgis has playwriting nerves of steel. For one thing, he chooses the right kind of worlds to write about: parallel to, but in many ways hidden from, our own, strange enough to fascinate yet recognizable enough to hit home. Language, too: the dialogue is always emotionally specific and accurate to the character, even as it makes the most profane and hilarious leaps... Completely compelling.” – Jesse Green, New York
“Scenes switch from tender to gritty to shocking... Guirgis specializes in stories of working-class heroes and zeroes — and everyone in between.” – Joe Dziemianowicz, NY Daily News
“A wonderful, generous, altogether unpredictable urban tragicomedy.” – Linda Winer, Newsday
“Guirgis, like other storytellers who explore the sacred and the profane, is most interested in how grace transforms us. His empathetic, poetic tales of ex-cons, addicts, and other men whom society would label losers return us, again and again, to a world that Guirgis, by virtue of his particular religion—the church of the streets—illuminates with the bright and crooked light of his faith.” – Hilton Als, New Yorker
“A gem! Quite possibly the author’s most accomplished piece to date. Over the past decade or so, playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis has become the foremost interpreter of NYC’s Upper West Side — actually, make that Upper, Upper West Side.” – Entertainment Weekly