In this witty adventure for young audiences by MacArthur "genius" award winner Naomi Wallace, a young girl called Noil finds herself in a strange new place, and must accomplish three and a half magical tasks before she can return home. Noil is clever and resourceful, and with some assistance from a singing narrator and a talking roach, she emerges from the hole in her sweater in time for breakfast.

High atop a railroad trestle that spans a bone dry creek, two teenagers plan to race across the bridge against an oncoming locomotive. At first their scheme adds excitement to life in a small factory town during the Great Depression, then sensual experience awakens dangerous passions in an era of stifled ambitions. With theatrical flourish and lyrical finesse, Naomi Wallace delves into a world where people struggle to change lives that bear down upon them. ..". Naomi Wallace, the thirty-eight-year-old Kentucky playwright at work here, received a MacArthur 'genius grant' last week, and TRESTLE...

Naomi Wallace's plays speak the underside of life. Her characters suffer and survive against the enormous weight of the times with a dignity that inspires. Her work challenges the audience and reader to reexamine the conflicts and meaning of our everyday lives through her singular, poetic imagery and language.

Includes: One Flea Spare
In the Heart of America
Slaughter City
The War Boys
The Trestle at Pope's Creek

-Extraordinarily powerful...it is a privilege to attend such a theatrically excellent event.---Independent

-Taut and beautifully written...an inspiration.---Observer

Four very different one-act plays that study the effect of war on very different individuals. Contains Gifts of War and Butterfly Fingers by Fraser Grace; and The Retreating World and A State of Innocence by Naomi Wallace.

In this lyrical, searing one-act, an American soldier has an unexpected encounter with two Afghan sisters who are ready to embark on a new life. Their fates-and his-become entangled as the lines between their divergent realities become dangerously blurred. "NO SUCH COLD THING unsettles the ground beneath our feet much as Wallace's] characters have found it vanishing beneath their own. The characters are pitched, dreamlike, somewhere between life and death as Wallace expertly pinpoints the reality of war in the magical-surreal of dramatic imagination." Robert Avila, San Francisco Bay Guardian...

"These plays are a cosmos of mindscapes, vast and varied in beauty, theme, style and form... And despite their multiplicity in accents, cultures and nationalities, they have an unyielding collective voice." - Nathalie Handal, from the Introduction

Includes:

Tennis in Nablus by Ismail Khalidi
Keffiyeh/Made in China by Dalia Taha
Plan D by Hannah Khalil
Handala by Abdelfattah Abusrour
Territories by Betty Shamieh
603 by Imad Farajin

The first collection of its kind, Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the...

"I sat in a theater at the Humana Festival last year, after the closing monologue of ONE FLEA SPARE, unable to move. I had known Naomi Wallace's work well, having directed an earlier play, and I knew she had tremendous talent and promise to do great things. Nothing had prepared me - not my admiration for her plays and for her beautiful, harsh, moving, brilliantly political poetry - for the experience of watching this play, which is in my opinion one of the finest works of dramatic literature written here or in England in the last two decades. Utterly without sentiment but possessed of a very...

Subtitled "Three Short Visions of the Middle East," this collection includes three thematically related short plays, A STATE OF INNOCENCE, THE RETREATING WORLD, and BETWEEN THIS BREATH AND YOU, collectively entitled THE FEVER CHART. Vision One, A STATE OF INNOCENCE, is set in Rafah, Palestine, and features a Palestinian woman, an Israeli architect, and an Israeli soldier. Vision Two, THE RETREATING WORLD, concerns an Iraqi bird keeper from Baghdad and his address before the International Pigeon Convention. Vision Three, BETWEEN THIS BREATH AND YOU, takes place after hours in the waiting room...

In Depression-era Alabama, black Sunday school teacher and Communist Party member Tice Hogan lives on the edge of trouble. When a white factory worker on the run demands sanctuary, Tice and his daughter may be pushed over that edge. "THINGS OF DRY HOURS is a beautiful, brave and devastating play, a profound imaginative delving into radical resistance and hope rising at an impossible moment, in crushingly inhospitable circumstances. No one writes about politics, history and all that's hidden underneath better than Naomi Wallace. Ferocious, tender, whimsical, tough, brutally direct, poetically...

Two imprisoned young women, one African American and the other white, form a perilous bond. As they serve time they forge a plan for survival. They practice hard. If they don't get it right they'll lose everything: the outside world is even more dangerous to their friendship than the jail itself. Exploring the fierce dreams of youth and the brutal reality of adulthood in 1950's segregated America. "Unmissable ... an exquisitely understated examination of female friendship and unspoken love. It's a truly American tragedy about two women who want so little and get nothing except from each...