THE STORY: Winner of the 2012 Drama Critics’ Circle for Best Play, Outer Critics Circle for Outstanding Play, Lucille Lortel Award for Best Play, and a 2012 Pulitzer Prize Finalist.
If to live is to suffer, then Joseph Douaihy is more alive than most. With unexplained chronic pain and the fate of his reeling family on his shoulders, Joseph’s health, sanity, and insurance premium are on the line. In an age when modern medicine has a cure for just about everything, SONS OF THE PROPHET is the funniest play about human suffering you’re likely to see.
“Explosively funny…one of the many soul-piercing truths in SONS OF THE PROPHET, the absolutely wonderful…comedy-drama by Stephen Karam, is that life rarely obeys the rules of dramatic consistency, or, for that matter, fair play. Written with insight and compassion, not to mention biting wit, it shines a clarifying light into some of life’s darker passages, exploring how people endure the unendurable, and not only survive but also move forward through their blighted lives with sustaining measures of hope, love and good humor.” —The New York Times.
“Ravishing is the best word to describe Stephen Karam’s new comedy SONS OF THE PROPHET…At once deep, deft and beautifully made, SONS OF THE PROPHET stares unflinchingly at the Gorgon’s head of grief—the kind of grief on which words have no purchase…SONS OF THE PROPHET ponders this hard truth; it makes us consider the unacceptable. Just as darkness shows off brilliance, the play’s poignant comedy makes us see that facing grief is the best way to ease its considerable grip. Karam’s nuanced, comic storytelling—a delicate weave of the spoken and the unspoken, the outrageous and the unconscionable—holds pain and pleasure together in startling equipoise, never trivializing either.” —The New Yorker.
“This is a major, devastating new play, elegant and subtle and infused with the kind of wit that understands how perilously life lingers near the emotional abyss.” —Newsday (NY).
“Devastating and thrilling…by turns grave, poetic, wrenching, wry, and madcap, SONS OF THE PROPHET…defies easy categorization. And it confirms Karam as a major voice in American theater.” —Vogue.
“In a single, dolefully sweet show, and one of the only new plays to take on the Great Recession at ground level, we discovered an important playwright in Stephen Karam…Greatness is prophesied herein: Perhaps all’s well in the future of American playwriting.” —New York Magazine.
