About the Play:

Finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Drama

The Glory of Living is a full-length drama by Rebecca Gilman. Fifteen-year-old Lisa thinks she can escape the misery of living with her trailer-park sex worker mom by fleeing with Clint, a car thief who marries Lisa then lures her into a nightmare of procuring young runaways for him. No one notices that these teenage girls are missing until an anonymous call to the police reports their murders. Could the caller – and the killer – be Lisa?

The Glory of Living is based on a true story set in the deep rural American South where a 15-year old girl, Lisa, the daughter of a sex worker, and Clint, an ex-con twice her age, run away together to escape the misery of life with her mother. But the happier times that sullenly childlike Lisa yearns for never materialize. Systematically abused by her husband, Lisa is coerced into helping him commit crimes of varying magnitude. As we quickly watch Lisa's world unravel into both tragedy and redemption, the play poses the question of what can happen when we discard our "undesirables" and what their alternate outcomes could be. Rebecca Gilman has created a riveting, unsentimental portrait of a young woman whose most striking quality is not her capacity for evil but the depth of her emptiness, in an environment as hard and unyielding as the contours of her life.

The Glory of Living premiered in 1996 at the Circle Theatre in Forest Park, Illinois and made a rising star of Rebecca Gilman, a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists. The play received critical acclaim rare for a new American play when it had its British premiere in 1999, garnering the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. Its Off-Broadway premiere was in 2001 by MCC Theater in New York City, under the direction of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Since then the play has been produced widely at professional theatres across the US and has been mounted by college theatres.

Cast: 5 female, 5 male (with doubling).

What people say:

"Plays don't come much tougher, or more compassionate, than ... Rebecca Gilman's The Glory of Living. It's a viscerally powerful piece that ... makes you look closely at a violent subculture from which you would normally shrink." — The Guardian (UK)

"…intelligent and provoking … Rebecca Gilman has created a couple whose degeneracy is the vehicle for a searing analysis of moral codes, sexual abuse, fear, love, poverty and the value of a life." — The Sunday Times (UK)

"…psychological shrewdness and on-target language…." — New York Magazine

"Powerful ... Rebecca Gilman's writing is enormously compelling." — Financial Times

About the Playwright:

Rebecca Gilman is an American playwright who received her M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Iowa in 1991. She is the first American playwright to win an Evening Standard Award for The Glory of Living (seen in the UK at the Royal Court Theatre), which also won the George Devine Award, was named one of Time magazine's Best Plays of the Decade, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been produced in the US at such venues as the Lincoln Center Theatre in New York, the Public Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, Manhattan Class Company, in the UK at the Royal Court Theatre, as well as other theatres internationally. A native of Alabama, she was awarded the 2008 Harper Lee Award for Alabama's Most Distinguished Writer of the Year.