About the Play:

In Arabia We'd All be Kings is a full-length drama by Stephen Adly Guirgis. A hit first play about the little guys, living amidst this flux. Most of them are old school residents of the inhospitable area of New York City known as Hell's Kitchen who are struggling with their day to day lives, addiction, regret, and survival. The rules are changing, whether they realize it or not. In these three days in the late 1990s, a tipping point is reached, and in their own ways each must adjust, but how?

In Arabia We'd All be Kings is about a group of down-and-outers whose entire lives revolve around the bar in Manhattan neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen in New York City. Lenny is a recently released ex-convict. Despite his imposing size, he was gang raped repeatedly while incarcerated and struggles to find his manhood on the outside. Daisy, his alcoholic girlfriend, craves a "real" life with a "real" man and abandons him at a seedy Times Square bar in pursuit of some cheap Chinese takeout. At the bar is Skank, a former failed actor turned junkie, who is trying to outlast the rain storm and get a buyback from the long-missing Irish bartender as he begins to go through withdrawals. Also at the bar is Sammy, an old, dying guilt-ridden drunk who exists somewhere between reality and the afterlife. DeMaris, a seventeen-year-old gun-brandishing single mother, wants to learn to turn tricks. She enlists the aid of Chickie, Skank's girlfriend, a young crackhead hooker who plays Go Fish with the simple-minded day bartender Char-lie, who thinks he's a Jedi warrior and who buys meals for Chickie because he loves her and because he lives for the day they can go out someday, "just as friends." The owner of the bar is Jake. The place was his father's before him, and after thirty years, he longs for the chance to leave "this sewer" for a re-invented life in Florida. The real-estate boom, "gentrification" and the emergence of Disney in Times Square affords him that opportunity. Unaware that their last piece of home is about to be pulled out from under them, the bar patrons struggle on. Their sense of humour, their misguided hopes and dreams, and their lack of self-pity are badges that are tattooed to their souls. They will all, before the end, demand and take the chance to face head on their complicated and sad truths.

In Arabia We'd All be Kings premiered at the LAByrinth Theatre in 1999, under the direction of Philip Seymour Hoffman. The Los Angeles premiere in 2007 by the Elephant Theatre Company in Hollywood received LA Drama Critic's Circle Awards for Best Play and Best Writing. The play has been performed in regional and college theatre productions.

Cast: 4 female, 8 male

What people say:

"…a harrowing new play…just when it seems [In Arabia We'd All be Kings] will settle for the shock value of its raw and violent language and imagery… Mr. Adly Guirgis begins to tie all his loose ends together in a grim and sad portrait of life on the streets." — The New York Times

"Shocking, shattering, stunningly well-written." — The Daily Telegraph

"Guirgis airs metaphysical ideas seldom touched by British dramatists." — The Times

About the Playwright:

Stephen Adly Guirgis is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor. Born and raised in New York City by an Irish-American mother and Egyptian father, he studied theatre at the State University of New York in Albany before being recruited by John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman to join New York City's non-profit LAByrinth Theater Company, of which he later became a co-artistic director. His screenwriting credits have included TV shows such as NYPD Blue and The Sopranos, and his play Between Riverside and Crazy won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.