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Two plays that explore communities of outsiders who strive to help one another persevere in the face of despair.
In this two-play volume, acclaimed playwright Will Arbery explores the dynamics within tight-knit communities of outsiders working together to persevere against despair, whether intimate or cosmic. From wildly different angles, Corsicana and Evanston Salt Costs Climbing both examine the shape-shifting specters of grief, the pull of desire and dreams, and the universal human need for receiving and giving care.
Praise for Corsicana
“Watching Corsicana,
I felt it was about who gets to make art, and for whom. Reading it, I felt it was about how becoming ‘grown’ is, for anyone, a lifelong process of failing upward. Thinking back on it, I feel it was about the way the world tucks beauty inside envelopes of sorrow, and vice versa…Without ignoring the bone-deep sadness of characters confused and stymied by loss, it lets us watch them climb their way out of it—heading toward joy and sharing some in the process.”
—Jesse Green, New York Times
“The four characters of Arbery’s Corsicana are all figuring things out: how to mature, how to move on, how to love, how to express. And they’re all taking care of each other in little ways…Will Arbery is quickly establishing himself as the poet of Texas loneliness. He is one of the most exciting playwrights working in the American theater, stretching the form to new shapes and expanding his voice with each successive play.”
—Lane Williamson, Exeunt
Praise for Evanston Salt Costs Climbing
“In a great piece of art, you’ll have one moment where the truth will punch through. But in
a profoundly generous piece of art, like Evanston—a play that is theoretical, painful, deep, and hysterically funny—those moments of truth keep punching through and through and through.”
—Chloe
Cooper Jones, Bomb Magazine
“Arbery is the playwright of the moment. His project as a playwright is to yank away that ‘dishonest mask of pretended order,’ using the means he has at hand—the empathetic tools of performance and the electrifying effects of wild unreality.”
—Helen Shaw, New
Yorker
Will Arbery is a playwright and screenwriter. His other plays include Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Plano, You Hateful Things, and Wheelchair. His awards include a Whiting, Obie, Lucille Lortel, and New York Drama Critics’ Circle. He’s currently under commission from Manhattan Theatre Club, Adventureland, and The Metropolitan Opera. He was a writer and producer on Succession (HBO).