About the Play:

Finalist for 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Winner of 2012 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play
Winner of 2012 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play

Sons of the Prophet is a full-length comedy by Stephen Karam. In an age when modern medicine has a cure for just about everything, Sons of the Prophet is a dark comedy about one family's ability to withstand a hailstorm of misfortunes. A refreshingly honest take on how we cope with wounds that just won't heal, and the funniest play about human suffering you're likely to see.

Sons of the Prophet is a deeply humorous, unflinching portrait of grief and loss that depicts a Lebanese-American family in rural Pennsylvania beset by an absurd string of tragedies. At the play's center is Joseph Douaihy, a once-promising world-class runner now sidelined by injury. With unexplained chronic pain and the fate of his reeling family on his shoulders, Joseph's health, sanity, and insurance premium are on the line. As Joseph confronts his deteriorating health, he is also forced to face the death of his father, an ailing Uncle, and a desperate boss beset by her own tragedies. Deftly keeping its various storylines in careful balance, Stephen Karam's play confronts, with abundant intelligence and great sympathy for human frailty, the inevitability of loss and the equally inevitable comedy resulting from our attempts to cope with is consequences.

Sons of the Prophet premiered in 2011 at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston and transferred to an extended off Broadway run at the Laura Pels Theater in New York City. The play has been performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 3 female, 5 male

What people say:

"Explosively funny… one of the many soul-piercing truths in Sons of the Prophet, the absolutely wonderful… comedy-drama by Stephen Karam, is that life rarely obeys the rules of dramatic consistency, or, for that matter, fair play. Written with insight and compassion, not to mention biting wit, it shines a clarifying light into some of life's darker passages, exploring how people endure the unendurable, and not only survive but also move forward through their blighted lives with sustaining measures of hope, love and good humor." — The New York Times

"Ravishing is the best word to describe Stephen Karam's new comedy Sons of the Prophet … At once deep, deft and beautifully made, Sons of the Prophet stares unflinchingly at the Gorgon's head of grief – the kind of grief on which words have no purchase… Sons of the Prophet ponders this hard truth; it makes us consider the unacceptable. Just as darkness shows off brilliance, the play's poignant comedy makes us see that facing grief is the best way to ease its considerable grip. Karam's nuanced, comic storytelling – a delicate weave of the spoken and the unspoken, the outrageous and the unconscionable – holds pain and pleasure together in startling equipoise, never trivializing either." — New Yorker

"This is a major, devastating new play, elegant and subtle and infused with the kind of wit that understands how perilously life lingers near the emotional abyss." — New York Newsday

"Devastating and thrilling…by turns grave, poetic, wrenching, wry, and madcap, Sons of the Prophet … defies easy categorization. And it confirms Karam as a major voice in American theater." — Vogue

"In a single, dolefully sweet show, and one of the only new plays to take on the Great Recession at ground level, we discovered an important playwright in Stephen Karam … Greatness is prophesied herein: Perhaps all's well in the future of American playwriting." — New York Magazine

About the Playwright:

Stephen Karam is an American playwright. He is the Tony Award-winning author of The Humans, Sons of the Prophet and Speech & Debate. For his work he's received two Drama Critics Circle Awards, an OBIE Award and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. He grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania and is a graduate of Brown University.