Weldon Rising' & 'Disappeared'

Description

"Each play I see by Phyllis Nagy confirms me in the belief that she is the finest playwright to have emerged in the 1990s" (Alistair Macaulay, Financial Times) Weldon Rising: Downtown New York. The temperature is soaring. In the meat-packing district, Natty Weldon's lover is casually butchered by a homicidal homophobe. The witnesses do not intervene. Natty flees in terror, two lesbians watch from their apartment window and a flamboyant transvestite prostitute cowers in the street below. But life changes for them after the murder. Disappeared: Sarah Casey, a travel agent who has never been anywhere, meets the mysterious Elston Rupp in a bar in New York's Hell's Kitchen. They walk out together and she is never seen again. Was she murdered, has she escaped from the city of loners, or has she simply vanished? Nagy is "the laconic laureate of this spiritual wasteland" (Paul Taylor, Independent)

Phyllis Nagy was born in New York City and has lived in London since 1992. Her plays, including Weldon Rising, Butterfly Kiss, Disappeared and The Strip, have been produced throughout the world and have received awards including the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award, a Mobil Prize, a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Eileen Anderson/Central Television Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a McKnight Foundation Fellowship. Phyllis is currently under commission to the Royal Shakespeare Company, Nottingham Playhouse and the Royal Court Theatre, where she was recently writer-in-residence. She has adapted Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley for the Watford Palace Theatre while Never Land, opened at the Royal Court Theatre in January 1998, while her version of Chekov's The Seagull was produced at Chichester Festival Theatre in the summer of 2003.