About the Play:

Three satiric plays by Oscar-winning screenwriter Ethan Coen.

The Coen brothers have one of the most beloved and critically acclaimed bodies of work in the history of cinema. One half of the duo, Ethan Coen made his Off-Broadway debut as a playwright with Almost an Evening.

The volume Almost An Evening contains three one-act plays by Ethan Coen. The theme is hell – both on earth and in the hereafter. In Waiting, someone waits somewhere for quite some time. In Four Benches, a voyage to self-discovery takes a British spy to steam baths in New York and Texas, and to park benches in the U.S. and U.K. In Debate, cosmic questions are taken up. Clever, provocative, and as engaging as the best fiction, these plays showcase yet another talent of one of the most celebrated contemporary writers.

In Waiting, an impatient everyman faces an uncertain future in an uncertain location that seems to be some kind of waiting room between salvation and damnation. The anxiety and despair hark back to dramas of the fifties – Sartre, Beckett, Pinter. (Cast: 1 female, 4 male)

Four Benches depicts an unlikely meeting in a steam room between a straight-talking Texan and a disillusioned British secret service agent. Both men learn from the encounter, though only one survives it. (Cast: 1 female, 5 male)

In Debate, the brash, cantankerous Old Testament "judging" God roundly abuses the kind, benevolent New Testament "loving" God. His profanity and ill humour receive a startling comeuppance, and further reversals and changes of point of view lead to a denouement that is no more preposterous than anything else in the play. (Cast: 2 female, 7 male)

Almost An Evening was first performed in 2008 at Atlantic Theatre Company's Stage 2 Off-Broadway in New York and ran to sold-out audiences.

What people say:

"With their macabre humor and dark sense of irony, the Coen Brothers' films offer a distinctively skewed view of Americana, appropriating genres from screwball to noir to convey a bizarre world in which heinous things happen. A similarly twisted perspective — and a reference frame ranging from Beckett to Mamet — is applied in Ethan Coen's first solo work for the theater, Almost An Evening, three short plays that swap planet U.S.A. for a more abstract universe in which philosophical, existential and metaphysical questions bounce around." — Variety

"Theatergoers nostalgic for the urbane, mind-teasing divertissements that once flourished Off-Broadway… should leave happily hungry." — The New York Times

"Boisterous and fun." — Entertainment Weekly

"Let's hope Coen finds time to write more plays." — Star-Ledger

About the Playwright:

Ethan Coen is an American screenwriter and producer who has also written plays, poetry, and short stories. Working alongside his brother Joel, he is widely considered one of the most visionary and idiosyncratic filmmakers of the late 20th Century.