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The Babylon Line
The Babylon Line
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Author: Richard Greenberg Publisher: Dramatists Play Service (cover may change) Format: Softcover # of Pages: 102 Pub. Date: 2018 Edition: Acting ISBN-10: 0822237164 ISBN-13: 9780822237167 Cast Size: 4 female, 3 male
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About the Play:
The Babylon Line is a full-length drama by Richard
Greenberg. A struggling writer still has to teach to earn a
living. He commutes from his home in Greenwich Village to a small
town to teach an adult education creative writing course. His
students discover the power of storytelling to alter their lives, and
one special student – a kindred spirit? something more? –
re-awakens his own artistic impulses.
The Babylon Line takes place at the hazy end of the 1960s
in Levittown, Long Island. It's the first night of an adult-ed
creative writing course in a classroom at the local high school. The
teacher, Aaron Port, lives in Greenwich Village and is painfully
aware of his failures as an artist when his desperate need for a job
forces him to reverse commute once a week on the Long Island Rail
Road's Babylon line to teach. His students are a mixed bag: Frieda
Cohen, Anna Cantor, and Midge Braverman, housewives all, embrace each
other on arrival, and update their running checklists on each other's
kids, husbands, and lawns. Their opening gambit is to tell Aaron in
no uncertain terms that they are only there because their preferred
classes were full. The two men in the class, Jack Hassenpflug and
Marc Adams, sit silently at their desks. One final student, Joan
Dellamond, rushes in late – but she actually does intend to be
there. Over the course of the semester, Aaron's adult pupils write
increasingly more honest life accounts and stories, and cracks begin
to appear in their small-town community. A particularly bold and
troubled student, Joan, is a Greenwich Village refugee who married
the only man she knew who wasn't an artist and moved out to Long
Island with him. She strikes up a rapport with Aaron that threatens
to become something more, as the pair bond over their failing
marriages and creative frustrations.
The Babylon Line premiered in 2014 at Vassar College's
Powerhouse Theater and then at Lincoln Center Theater's Mitzi E.
Newhouse Theater Off-Broadway where it was a critical and popular
success. The play has been
performed in
regional, college, and community theatre productions.
Cast: 4 female, 3 male
What people say:
"What a beguiling and
unpredictable play Richard Greenberg has written
in The Babylon Line, an elegiac look back on a
period of evolving social attitudes…[The play] weaves subtle
threads, conjuring a vivid world of cause and effect while harnessing
the power of fiction as a means either to escape or to comprehend
real life…an idiosyncratic pleasure." — The
Hollywood Reporter
"…wholly enjoyable…[an]
unpretentious but thought-provoking play…." — Variety
"The Babylon Line
is by Richard Greenberg; barbed repartee,
shiny epigrams, and baroque arias of loss and longing all come with
the territory…when Greenberg's creations babble on, you can't help
but lean in." — Time Out
(New
York)
"…the quiet, funny script
resonates with the evergreen themes of community, desire, and
self-discovery. It's a memorable ride." — Entertainment
Weekly
"Richard Greenberg's clever, sentimental and occasionally steamy drama… is a pleasing excursion with good humor and warm pathos." — Broadway World
About the Playwright:
Richard Greenberg is an American
playwright and television writer, known for his subversively humorous
depictions of middle-class American life. One of the most produced
playwrights of his generation, he has had more than 25 plays premiere
on and off-Broadway and has won the Oppenheimer Award for a debuting
playwright, the first PEN/Laura Pels Award for a mid-career
playwright and has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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