About the Play:

The Realistic Joneses is a full-length drama by Will Eno. Two suburban couples share more than a surname. As their relationships begin to irrevocably intertwine, the Joneses must decide between their idyllic fantasies and their imperfect realities.

The Realistic Joneses is about friends and neighbours, love and life. Bob and Jennifer and their new neighbours, John and Pony, are two suburban couples with the last name Jones. But they have even more in common than their identical homes and their shared last names. This existential comedy, pitched in Will Eno's singular voice, finds the darkness, sweetness and hilarity in our fleeting and ordinary days, as we seek to reveal ourselves, and conceal ourselves, often in the same minute. Sometimes there are only short-term answers to life's eternal questions, but all four Joneses, like all of us, are going to try their best, in very different ways. A suburban comedy on its surface, a wrenching
reflection on love and death at its core.

The Realistic Joneses premiered in 2012 at Yale Repertory Theatre, the internationally celebrated professional theater in residence at Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut, before appearing on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in 2014, where it won a Drama Desk Award, was named USA Today's "Best Play on Broadway," topped the The Guardian's 2014 list of American plays and was included in The New York Times' "Best Theatre of 2014." Since then the play had regional premieres at professional theatres across the US and has been mounted by colleges and community theatres.

Cast: 2 women, 2 men

What people say:

"Plays as funny and moving, as wonderful and weird as The Realistic Joneses do not appear often on Broadway. Or ever, really... Mr. Eno's voice may be the most singular of his generation, but it's humane, literate and slyly hilarious. He makes the most mundane language caper and dance, revealing how absurd attempts at communication can be. He also burrows into the heart of his characters to reveal the core of their humanity: the fear and loneliness and unspoken love that mostly remains hidden beneath the surface as we plug away at life, come what may...For all the sadness woven into its fabric, The Realistic Joneses brought me a pleasurable rush virtually unmatched by anything I've seen this season." — New York Times

"As usual, Eno's dialogue is a marvel of compression and tonal control, trivial chitchat flipping into cosmic profundity with striking ease... There's much to savor: the dry but meaningful banter, the joy of humans sharing time and space, battling the darkness with a joke or silence. Life in Enoland isn't what you'd call realistic – it's more real than that." — Time Out (New York)

"A macabre and melancholy yet strangely delightful comedy... In The Realistic Joneses the world is familiar and, then again, very scary. It's also weird and cruel and profound in all sorts of unexpected places – as sad as life but a whole lot funnier." — Newsday

"A funny yet poignant play... Eno long ago staked his claim as a linguistic hipster who reimagines the absurdist likes of Beckett and Albee for our post-Seinfeld age... ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,' we are told in Beckett, and so it is with this very fine play where laughter exists a heartbeat, or heartbreak, away from tears." — The Telegraph (London)

About the Playwright:

Will Eno is an American playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, he has collected critical acclaim and the admiration of actors everywhere for his idiosyncratic ear for language and his dialogue steeped in a signature blend of wit and pathos. The New York Times has called him "a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation." He made his Broadway debut with his critically acclaimed play, The Realistic Joneses.