The Open House

(Paperback)

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Description

People have been born into families since people started getting born at all. Playwrights have been trying to write Family Plays for a long time, too. And typically these plays try to answer endlessly complicated questions of blood and duty and inheritance and responsibility. They try to answer the question, "Can things really change" People have been trying nobly for years and years to have plays solve in two hours what hasn't been solved in many lifetimes. This has to stop. The Open House is an hour and twenty minutes, with no intermission.

Reviews

Mr. Eno...has established himself as one of the most vital, distinctive voices in the American theater over the past decade. Once encountered, his style is not likely to be forgotten: Wryly humorous and deeply engaged in the odd kinks and quirks of language and its fuzzy relationship to meaning, his plays are also infused with a haunted awareness of, and a sorrowful compassion for, the fundamental solitude of existence. * New York Times *
If the American family drama were a trout - playwright Will Eno would gut it, shellac it, mount it on a plaque and make it wiggle and croon "Take Me to the River." - his work combines studied banality, sneaky weirdness and formal ingenuity. * Time Out *
Anarchic and deliciously clever * Huffington Post *

Author Bio

Will Eno lives in Greenpoint, New York. He is a Fellow at the Signature Theater in New York, where his play Title and Deed premiered in May 2012. His play The Realistic Joneses had its premiere at the Yale Repertory Theater, in April 2012. Both The Realistic Joneses and Title and Deed were on The New York Times' Best Plays of 2012 list. His play Middletown was a winner of the Horton Foote Award and was produced at the Vineyard Theater in New York and Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. His play Thom Pain (based on nothing) ran for a year at the DR2 Theater, was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, and has been translated into over a dozen languages. He was recently awarded the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation Award. Other work has appeared in Harper's, The Believer, and The Quarterly. He strikes me as being the real thing, a real playwright. He takes every chance. And Will keeps his voice his own: he has an awareness of the human condition I wish more people his age had. Edward Albee