I'm Gonna Pray for You So Hard

Feiffer Halley

Description

Ella is a precocious and fiercely competitive actress whose aims in life are making her famous playwright father proud-and becoming famous herself. In the aftermath of a boozy, drug-fueled evening when Ella's father is particularly hurtful, she flings herself into the arms of a young director with whom she begins to collaborate on a one-woman show . . . about her father. Halley Feiffer's dark, probing, and much-anticipated new play is a fierce, funny, and gloves-off take on the eternal struggles of parents and children to find common ground.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 31 août 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781468316568
• Langue: English

Extrait

PRAISE FOR THE PLAYS OF HALLEY FEIFFER
HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS AND THEN KILL THEM
Ms. Feiffer is building a reputation for fearlessness.
-Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times
Thank God for the warped creative mind of playwright/actress Halley Feiffer, who harnesses the weird to full, gory effect in How to Make Friends and Then Kill Them , an uproarious and deeply unsettling new dark comedy Equally laugh-out-loud funny, jaw-droppingly gross, and thoroughly sad Feiffer s unique, refreshing voice is one to which attention should be paid.
-David Gordon, Theatermania
Disturbingly funny.
-Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News
A wicked comedy Feiffer is an expert comic actor with an appealingly skewed sensibility.
-Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post
Feiffer has a commendable eye for the absurd.
- The New Yorker
There s great stuff here dark and weird.
- Time Out New York
I M GONNA PRAY FOR YOU SO HARD
Viciously funny brutally effective. Feiffer takes a tough look at the forces that can bring us to our knees.
-Adam Feldman, Time Out New York
A bone-chilling punishing drama.
-Charles Isherwood, The New York Times
Blistering, blackly funny.
-Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News
One minute you re laughing, the next you re cringing the play sticks in your head like a crazy nightmare.
-Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post
Funny, scary, and completely over the top in its own right goes straight for the jugular through the heart.
-Robert Hofler, The Wrap
Provocative, sensitive, shocking and often very unsettling polished and probing. One of the best plays I ve seen this season.
-Rex Reed, New York Observer
Exhilaratingly toxic.
-Joe McGovern, Entertainment Weekly
A hard-hearted stunner.
-Michael Schulman, The New Yorker
Halley Feiffer s ferocious, explosive dialogue in I m Gonna Pray For You So Hard is in a class of its own.
-Lee Kinney, TheEasy.com
It s a fearless piece of work, riveting and hilarious.
-Robert Feldberg, Bergen Record
HALLEY FEIFFER is a New York-based writer and actress. Her full-length plays include I m Gonna Pray For You So Hard (World Premiere Atlantic Theater Company, 2015), How To Make Friends And Then Kill Them (World Premiere Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, 2014), and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Gynecologic Oncology Unit At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of New York City (World Premiere MCC Theater, 2016). Her plays have been developed by Manhattan Theatre Club, Second Stage, New York Theater Workshop, LAByrinth Theater Company, The O Neill, and elsewhere. She holds commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Williamstown Theater Festival, Jen Hoguet Productions, and Playwrights Horizons. She co-wrote and starred in the 2013 film He s Way More Famous Than You and co-created and stars in the web series What s Your Emergency . She is a writer on the Starz series The One Percent .
Copyright
CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that performance of the Play I M GONNA PRAY FOR YOU SO HARD is subject to payment of a royalty. The Play is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), and of all countries covered by the Pan-American Copyright Convention, the Universal Copyright Convention, the Berne Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including without limitation professional/ amateur stage rights, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound recording. all other forms of mechanical, electronic and digital reproduction, transmission and distribution, such as CD, DVD, the Internet, private and file-sharing networks, information storage and retrieval systems, photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are strictly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed upon the matter of readings, permission for which must be secured from the Author s agent in writing. Inquiries concerning rights should be addressed to ICM Partners 730 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10019. Attn: Di Glazer.
This edition first published in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2015 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
N EW Y ORK
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [e-mail] , or write us at above address.
L ONDON
30 Calvin Street
London E1 6NW
[e-mail]
www.ducknet.co.uk
For bulk and special sales, please contact [e-mail] , or write us at the above address.
Copyright 2015 by Halley Feiffer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-4683-1656-8
Contents
Praise
About the Author
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgments
Production Credits
Scene 1
Scene 2
PREFACE
A young actress, Ella, has just opened in a production of The Seagull , and some hours later, in the wee hours of the night, is in her playwright father s kitchen on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (ahh the Upper West Side, home to world-weary artists of a certain generation, to refugees from the old world, exiles and psychiatrists, Jewish intellectuals, and so on, all virtually extinct), all of whose children have fled now for Brooklyn, the coast, or at least somewhere below Houston Street.
Because children flee their parents, as they must, as they should, in order to become whatever they must be.
Not, however, Ella, the actress in question.
In her mid 20s at least, she is still a captive to her father s opinions and decrees, which tonight spew forth from his mouth in an endless fountain not of youth but of vitriol, spleen, and rage. (Along the lines of You re too good for the role of Masha / you shoulda been Nina / but the production was terrible anyway, the director is a hack, AND he was too busy to direct my last play. ) And THIS father knows from the theatre; what with his aging Pulitzer on the shelf, endless anecdotes about how he came up, and a paucity of new ideas, grace, or generosity, he is THE authority, the final word, the bottom line-when it comes to passing judgment on his daughter and her nascent life in the now dead and useless American theatre, which he feels has spit him out like a husk. And thus begins Halley Feiffer s brilliant and harrowing play about art and life in the theatre, fathers and daughters, and the making of clever little monsters.
I m Gonna Pray For You So Hard dives long and deep into a spectacularly dangerous and ill-lit pool-a final night, as it were, of the soul for a young artist who can barely keep up with her father s coke, screeds, and weed use but tries gamely, while in the other room, the young actress s mother, a silent party, a totem and victim, has retired for the night but can still hear the laughter and venom wafting in to the bedroom from the kitchen where the action all goes down. And then in Act 2, the play changes course to explore the dire, inevitable consequences of that night and so many nights like it, from a distance of some years on. Ella has by then become a hardened thing of New York-well armored, brittle, and fueled by the same mind-altering substances, replaying the old deadly songs she sang with her dad, but in a far lower key.
Joan Didion famously observed, Writers are always selling somebody out. I don t know if that s true-if for instance, the always always applies-but I accept the premise that a writer has to have some delicately honed listening devices always in use, always recording, like some omnipresent, undetectable NSA system floating in deep space. Writers need memories as long as they are flawed, and they need to accept those flaws because it is only in the flaws that we find the components to make art. A play like Halley s is born in the liminal spaces between narrative and memory, where fog and haze distort our vision. It is only in sifting through our worst nights and the lies we are complicit in during them that the betrayal Ms. Didion speaks of becomes more valuable than a petty act of literary revenge.
Halley Feiffer may be the daughter of a famous playwright, but what she has done with that small statement of fact is to turn it inside out, doing what all writers, what all artists must do; using the repository of memory to cannibalize mood, lifting out bits of film from the old cans, clips from the weird home movies we carry inside, playing them over and over, peering at the stills, the scents and textures we call recollection, to make something whole and complete and her own.
What so compelled me toward her play was that I recognized that, like me, she is trying to sift through the particles and debris from prior crash sites in her own life. Trying to become somewhat better: a better thinker, a better writer, a more whole being; someone capable of conjuring up a recognizable and yet original world. I also think plays can be warnings to their authors, canaries in the coal mine in some inchoate prescriptive sense. (An example-in my play, The Film Society , a very early play, I see the outline of a terrible future in an awful past, one in which my weakness becomes so deadly, that it costs people around me everything. I have, over the years, tried to avoid becoming the central character in that play, which I only identified in the first place by writing the thing.)
Watch