
Stephen Adly Guirgis has been hailed as one of the most promising playwrights at work in America today. A masterful poet of the downtrodden, his plays portray life on New York's hardscrabble streets in a manner both tender and unflinching, while continually exploring the often startling gulf between who we are and how we perceive ourselves. Gathered in this volume is his current off-Broadway hit, Our Lady of 121st Street, a comic portrait of the graduates of a Harlem Catholic school reunited at the funeral of a beloved teacher, along with his two previous plays: the philosophical jailhouse drama Jesus Hopped the A Train and In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings, an Iceman Cometh for the Giuliani era that looks at the effect of Times Square's gentrification on its less desirable inhabitants.
"Guirgis already belongs on the list of accomplished young American playwrights that includes Suzan-Lori Parks and David Auburn." --Bruce Weber, The New York Times Magazine
"The best new play in a decade." --The New York Observer "Guirgis has a hilarious, sympathetic, terrific ear . . . he heightens the rhythms of the street until there is a brilliant, buoyant cacophony." --Donald Lyons, New York Post "An important new playwright has arrived." --The New Yorker