 Dead City
a modern riff on James Joyce’s Ulysses
by Sheila Callaghan
February 5-22, 2009
Samantha Blossom wakes up one June morning in her Upper East Side apartment to find her life being narrated over the airwaves of public radio. She discovers in the mail an envelope addressed to her husband from his lover, which spins her raw and untethered into an odyssey through the city – a day full of chance encounters, coincidences, a quick love affair, and a fixation on a mysterious but damaged poet genius Jewel. This 90-minute multimedia comic drama by bad-girl playwright Sheila Callaghan is a modernized, gender-reversed, relocated, hyper-theatrical riff on the novel Ulysses, occurring exactly 100 years to the day after Joyce’s jaunt through Dublin, directed by Alan Patrick Kenny.
“Dead City is a stylish, lyrical, fascinating, occasionally irritating, and eminently worthwhile – the kind of work that is thoroughly invigorating.”
-Backstage
“Wonderful…Sheila Callaghan’s pleasingly witty and theatrical new drama that is a love letter to New York masquerading as hate mail. Callaghan writes with a world-weary tone and has a poet’s gift for economical description. The entire dead city comes alive.”
-The New York Times
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