About the Play:

Hurlyburly has long been a favourite of acting teachers for female monologues, male monologues, female/female scenes, and male/male scenes.

Hurlyburly is a full-length dark comedy by David Rabe. Several low-to-mid-level Hollywood players and their various girlfriends and hangers-on engage in cocaine-fueled, misogynistic mind games in David Rabe's tour de force black satire of Tinseltown corruption. Hurlyburly is a challenging play for intelligent actors of all levels.

Hurlyburly depicts the intersecting relationships of two Hollywood casting directors, their actor and screenwriter friends, caught in love-hate relationships with Hollywood women, in a brutally comic reflection on the decade of decadence in the cocaine-and-sex infused Hollywood Hills in the mid-1980s. Welcome to Eddie's world. It exists at the very juncture where Hollywood meets the mountains, where the almost-rich and the not-yet-famous live on cheap thrills and heady ambition while searching for true love and redemption. Here, two casting-director roommates Eddie and Mickey, along with screenwriter and wanna-be-producer Artie and hitman-turned-two-bit-actor Phil, engage in a wild life of witty repartee and snappy come-backs, of ex-wives and future lovers, of hard partying and late nights, of sex, lies and self-obsession. Hurlyburly is a scathingly funny and touchingly human story about the quest to find meaning in our morally muddled times. Fuelled by large quantities of drugs, Eddie and his friends continue their entertaining and manic pursuit of sensation – until a series of encounters with destiny, decadence and even death convinces Eddie to plunge beneath the surface... and perhaps even discover his soul. David Rabe's masterpiece has long been an actors' favourite – it attracted the likes of William Hurt, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken, Jerry Stiller, Cynthia Nixon, and Sigorney Weaver for its Broadway premiere and, a young Daniel Craig for its London bow 13 years later.

Hurlyburly premiered in 1984 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, before heading to New York City. It briefly ran Off-Broadway at Manhattan's Promenade Theatre, then moved to Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where it was immediately hailed as a classic American drama, ran for a year and received four Tony Award nominations. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional repertory and college theatre productions.

Cast: 3 female, 4 male

What people say:

"Offers some of Mr. Rabe's most inventive and disturbing writing. At his impressive best, Mr. Rabe makes grim, ribald and surprisingly compassionate comedy out of the lies and ationalizations that allow his alienated men to keep functioning if not feeling in the fogs of lotusland. They work in an industry so corrupt that its only honest executives are those who openly admit that they lie." — New York Times

"An important work, masterfully accomplished." — Time

"A powerful permanent contribution to American drama…. Riveting, disturbing, fearsomely funny…. Has a savage sincerity and a crackling theatrical vitality. This deeply felt play deserves as wide an audience as possible." — Newsweek

About the Playwright:

David Rabe has been hailed as one of America's greatest living playwrights. Four of his plays have been nominated for the Tony Award, including one win for Best Play. He is the recipient of an Obie Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, Drama Desk Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and three Hull-Warriner Awards for playwriting, among others. He is also the author of numerous screenplays, two critically acclaimed novels and a collection of short stories. Born in Dubuque, Iowa, David Rabe lives with his family in Northwest Connecticut.