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The Babylon Line

The Babylon Line
Your Price: $18.95 CDN
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

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.