The Oldest Boy: A Play in Three Ceremonies

Description

In The Oldest Boy, the newest work from the visionary playwright Sarah Ruhl, faith and family are put at odds when a three-year-old boy is recognized as the reincarnation of a high Buddhist Lama. Tradition requires that the boy begin the monastic life as soon as possible, a revelation that anguishes his father, a Tibetan-born restaurateur, and his mother, a Midwesterner torn between her respect for her husband's culture and her maternal instinct. The Oldest Boy utilizes song, dance, and puppetry to tell a story of mingling cultures, spiritual seeking, and parental heartbreak. With gentle humor and compassion it enacts the central struggle of any mother's experience: accepting that loving also means letting go.

Sarah Ruhl's plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize); Passion Play, a cycle (PEN American Award); Dead Man's Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award); and, most recently, Stage Kiss and Dear Elizabeth. She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, the Whiting Writers' Award, the PEN Center Award for a midcareer playwright, the Feminist Press's Forty Under Forty Award, and the 2010 Lilly Award. She is currently on the faculty at Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.

"Gorgeous . . . Extremely imaginative and hypnotically beautiful." --Marilyn Stasio, Variety "[An] emotional tsunami . . . An extraordinary story [from] a singular new voice in American theater." --David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter "Ms. Ruhl's drama [The Oldest Boy] is among the most easily accessible from this poetic, venturesome playwright . . . It is marked by Ms. Ruhl's inquisitive intelligence, clean-lined eloquence and spiky humor." --Charles Isherwood, The New York Times "Bewitching, ingenious and seriously moving." --Linda Winer, Newsday