c/o George Lane
Creative Artists Agency
162 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10010
(212) 277-9000
(212) 277-9099 fax
Agent Email:
GLaneAsst@caa.com
Email:
newdramatists@newdramatists.org
ON THE MOUNTAIN
One-act drama, 80 minutes
2W, 2M
unit set
As her mother falls in love with a mysterious stranger, a teenage girl
discovers a secret that shatters her.
“On the Mountain is so skillfully
written...Pointed and astute.”—Michael Feingold, Village Voice
“An evocative new play. The accumulation of detail yields up-to-date
insights on independence and isolation. Shinn's literary reserve rewards
audiences who are willing to read between his lines.”—Adam Feldman, Time
Out
“Christopher Shinn’s well-plotted new drama has surprising nuance and
sudden surges of emotion. The play offers several outstanding
monologues, some tender, some searing, and one unforgettable.”—Liesl
Schlesinger, New Yorker
“‘How do you not be depressed?’ asks a character in Christopher Shinn’s
On the Mountain. In this moving and understated drama, the playwright
delves into the psyches of his characters as they attempt to reconcile
with their pasts while trying to make sense of their present.”—Dan
Bacalzo, theatermania.com
FOUR
One-act Drama, 90 Minutes
3M, 1W
Multiple Set
A sparse, poetic look at the lives of four characters in and around
Hartford, Connecticut, on the 4th of July in 1996.
“A faltering dance of attraction and repulsion… Ambiguities abound in
Mr. Shinn’s world of blurred sexual and ethnic identities...a smart,
broken-hearted play.” -- Ben Brantley, New York Times
“In Four, desperation hides inside chatter, bluster, and shows of
authority…the demands of homosexuality and heterosexuality are center
stage. So are the secret signals that parents pass on to children --
misery, hypocrisy, passivity -- along with all their good intentions. The
usual race and class equations have been upended. Nothing is emotionally
simple. The play keeps delivering small shocks and aches that end in a
standoff, or maybe in that pause between despair, resignation, and a
twinge of hope. Haunting.” -- Margo Jefferson, New York Times
Produced at Royal Court Theatre (1998); About Face Theatre (2000);
Worth Street Theatre (2001); Manhattan Theatre Club (2002). Readings and
workshops at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Carnegie-Mellon Showcase of New
Plays, Cherry Lane Alternative, ASK Theatre Projects, Vineyard Theatre.
OTHER PEOPLE
Three-act Comic/Drama, 120 Minutes
4M, 1W
Multiple Set
A wicked, mournful study of three young artists trying to get their lives
and careers together in New York City’s East Village.
“Real lives, Other People, suggests, are more confused, scattered, odd,
lonely and droll than you would guess from musicals that sentimentalize
poverty or from movies that romanticize violence or, indeed, from most
other products of the American entertainment factory.… Edgy, troubled
characters, sharply realistic dialogue, and a distinctive milieu.” --
Benedict Nightengale, The Times (London)
“As in Rent, but with far less bombast and much more depth, Shinn’s
characters are East Village artists sharing an apartment and, at the
annual emotional stocktake that is Christmas, they’re on various rungs of
the success ladder. Happily and unhappily, they over articulate their
dreams and desires, yet the secret of Shinn’s success is the way he
exploits the dramatic gap between what is said and unsaid. Shinn’s play is
really about fantasy and love. Writing like this is rare.” -- David
Benedict, The Independent (London)
Produced at the Royal Court (2000); and Playwrights Horizons (2000).
THE COMING WORLD
Two-act Drama, 100 Minutes
1M, 1W
Unit Set
A dense, operatic play set on a New England beach at night about a young
woman’s tragic relationship with two twin brothers.
“A haunting, cunningly constructed play that tackles big themes--the
nature of truth and of love--with a deceptively light touch. Shinn creates
a sense of loss and lost opportunities that is deeply affecting.”
--Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph (London)
“A delicate dialogue... Shinn weaves his words into a structure of
shifting feelings and perspectives. The result is cumulatively bleak, but
for all its bleakness it is never also pitiless. Its sense of hope and
desolation shifts between solid sands and liquid seas... An eerily intense
poetic trance.” -- Patrick Marmion, Evening Standard (London)
Produced by Soho Theatre, London (2001).
WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN
Two-act Comedy/Drama
5M, 2W
Unit Set
A bleak, witty epic that follows a young writer from a troubled
apprenticeship to a tragic paralysis, set against the historical,
political, and literary movements of the 1990s.
"Still in his mid-20's, Mr. Shinn is a welcome paradox among
up-and-coming American dramatists: a creator of carefully constructed,
dialogue-heavy works that nonetheless resonate with a sense of the
unspoken. What Didn't Happen is about the distance between people, and the
ways in which even friends, spouses and lovers are ultimately unknowable
to one another. Mr. Shinn writes with a highly polished eloquence. But it
is, above all, his focus on that indefinable ''something'' that makes him
a playwright to cherish." --Ben Brantley, New York Times
"Christopher Shinn is a bold, young and limber playwright. Shinn just
cannot write a fake or untelling word. WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN is a delightful
tale." -- Donald Lyons, New York Post
Playwrights Horizons, 2002. Readings and workshops at Mark Taper Forum
(1998), New York Shakespeare Festival (1999), and New York Stage and Film
(1999).
WHERE DO WE LIVE
Three-act Drama, 120 minutes
7M, 2W
Multiple Set
On the Lower East Side, two neighbors struggle to keep living in an
increasingly fractured city.
"WHERE DO WE LIVE is a deeply haunting play about a city struggling
against darkness. It's not simply because its events occur either side of
9/11 that this play hits us where we live now. More disturbing is one's
awareness as the play unfolds that all its talk of doing good can't
preempt a fractiousness and dissonance that are part of New York's
inherent beat. ‘It's not easy to be alive,’ remarks Patricia (Susannah
Wise), best friend to gay writer Stephen (Daniel Evans), early in a play
that ends by imprinting upon auds a truly unsettling awareness of just how
easy it is to be dead. One can imagine any number of 9/11 plays still to
come destined to co-opt that particular date as a mawkish shorthand or
even substitute for the hard slog of real drama. No such worries here.
Fascinated by empathy – ‘Just what it is, how it comes to be,’ he says --
Stephen holds fast to liberal impulses his friends don't necessarily
condone, unless good coke gets scored in the process. Like Tony Kushner,
whom Shinn somewhat resembles in his tendency toward rhetoric that lets
the playwright's own voice ring out, this younger dramatist always locates
his characters, however insular they may wish to be, in a world readily
impinging upon them."
--Matt Wolf, Variety
"Where, people ask, are the post-September 11 plays? The young American
writer, Christopher Shinn, answers the question by offering a wry,
quizzical look at New York lives before and after. His conclusions are
suitably mixed: on a personal level, people may have been drawn together
by catastrophe, but, politically, America shifted even further to the
right. Shinn's purpose is clear: to show that even before 9/11 America was
deeply divided. Stephen inhabits a hedonistic world where the businessmen
in bars are as recklessly individualistic as the gay men in clubs and at
parties; and, if drugs are a recreation for the clubbers, they are a form
of economic survival for the black family across the hall. But the final
act implies everything was irrevocably shaken up by the attack on the
World Trade Center: while some instinctively reached out to their
neighbors, others lapsed into gung ho patriotism. As a response to the
self-involvement of New York life, the play is honest, critical, and
forthright. Shinn takes a scalpel to privileged selfishness. A
refreshingly caustic report from the front line." -- Michael Billington,
The Guardian (UK)
Produced at the Royal Court (2002) and the Vineyard Theatre (2004).
THE SLEEPERS
One-Act Comedy, 25 Minutes
2M, 1W
Unit Set
Two young men meet in a bar and return home to masturbate together.
"A brilliant one-act. The Sleepers follows one evening in the life of
two men who hit it off while masturbating in the backroom of a gay bar.
Each carries with him emotional baggage that is alternately forgotten and
relived in this tender, sad, mesmerizing piece of theater." -- Dan Bacalzo,
theatermania.com
Produced, New York Fringe Festival 2002, Singularity Company. Winner,
Best in Fringe.