THE STORY: After grad school, Catherine and Gwen chose polar opposite paths. Catherine built a career as a rockstar academic, while Gwen built a home with her husband and children. Decades later, unfulfilled in polar opposite ways, each woman covets the other’s life, commencing a dangerous game of musical chairs—the prize being Gwen’s husband. With searing insight and trademark wit, this comedy is an unflinching look at gender politics in the wake of 20th-century feminist ideals.
Finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
“…intensely smart, immensely funny…What’s exciting about [Gionfriddo’s] writing here is the multiplicity of the ideas it engages. Heady with sharp-witted dialogue about the particularities of women’s experience (there’s a joke about pornography and Google maps—believe it or not—that’s worth the ticket price alone), RAPTURE more largely illuminates how hard it can be to forge both a satisfying career and a fulfilling personal life in an era that seems to demand superhuman achievement from everyone.” —The New York Times.
“If you are a feminist, are interested in feminism or are in a relationship with a feminist, you need to see the play RAPTURE, BLISTER, BURN by Gina Gionfriddo, because it is about you…By embodying five different perspectives on love, work and women, Gionfriddo puts feminism into dialogue with its detractors and itself…By creating three-dimensional people with real foibles, senses of humor and very personal needs, Gionfriddo manages to take academic feminism from the theoretical to the personal.” —Ms. Magazine.
“A shrewd, incisive, thoroughly winning comedy. Sharp-eyed, big-hearted, and sure-footed, Gionfriddo ranges across the topography of the women’s movement—and the lives that shaped that movement—while demonstrating the confidence to embrace contradictions of all kinds.” —Boston Globe.
“There’s nothing more enjoyable than watching super-smart characters make exceedingly dumb decisions, and seeing beautiful, brilliant Cathy entangled with Internet-porn-addicted pothead Don sets off an almost unbelievable chain of sometimes comic, mostly tragic events…Thoughtful, funny…One of the top ten plays of 2012.” —Entertainment Weekly.
