About the Play:

Paris has become a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Female/Male Scenes.

Paris is a full-length drama by Eboni Booth. Her first ever play, Eboni Booth's off-Broadway hit Paris is a fierce, funny and subtle look at working-class America, exploring the erasure of race in the face of self-preservation in a rural community.

Paris is about invisibility, being underpaid, and how it feels to work on your feet for 10 hours a day while trying to preserve your soul. The year is 1995, and Paris is a small town in Vermont, where minimum-wage gigs start at $5 an hour. Returning home, Emmie, a Black woman with one year of college, tries to make ends meet while navigating the challenges of being one of the only Black people in a predominantly white community. After finally landing a desperately needed second job at Berry's, a retail giant off the interstate selling everything from baby carrots to lawnmowers, she begins to understand a new kind of isolation. Paris is an off-beat workplace comedy that explores the impacts of race and economics on the wage-earners of rural America.

Paris premiered in 2020 at Atlantic Theatre Company off-Broadway in New York City. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been performed in regional, fringe, and college theatre productions.

Cast: 3 female, 4 male

What people say:

"Paris is often funny in the style of a workplace sitcom. But [it] also casts the discomfiting shadows of a low-key social and psychological thriller. Both its humor and its quiet horrors are connected to the social realities of race and the disintegration of a viable working class. Booth's deft and delicate hand cuts with slow deliberation until it reaches the bone." — Time Out New York

"Racism is a stealth force in Eboni Booth's astute and coolly observant new play. A solid addition to the genre of sociologically detailed working-class American dramas. Simple yet startling ." — New York Times

"A fierce distillation of life under modern precarity. The chill of this show went so deep... hilarious and dangerous." — New York Magazine

"A lean and impressive debut... Each character is both sharply written and played. Paris will transport you to a place that comes to feel as intimate and epic as the city with which it shares its name." — The Daily Beast

About the Playwright:

Eboni Booth is an American writer and actor from New York City. Her plays include Primary Trust (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama) and Paris (her playwriting debut). For television, she has written for Hulu's We Were the Lucky Ones and HBO Max's Julia and has staffed in writers rooms for Netflix and FX. As a critically acclaimed actor, she has appeared in productions at venerated New York venues including Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theater Club, Page 73, Soho Rep and more. She is a graduate of Juilliard's playwriting program and the University of Vermont.