The Dazzle and Everett Beekin : Two Plays

Two “haunting and luminous” (Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times) plays from the author of Take Me Out and Three Days of RainIn The Dazzle, Richard Greenberg takes on the story of the Collyer brothers, legendary New York eccentrics who, following their deaths in 1947, were found to have collected more than 136 tons of trash within their grand but crumbling Harlem manse. As depicted by Richard Greenberg, Langley and Homer Collyer are consumed by their obsessions—Homer reveling in telling tall tales, Langley captured by the “dazzle” of images contained within objects—in this “beautiful, disturbing, shockingly funny and profoundly humane play by a masterful dramatist” (Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times).Everett Beekin explores the tensions between the safety of family and the yearning for a larger life through the relationships of two sets of Jewish sisters. Set in the 1940s, Act One opens with Anna and Sophie dining in their mother’s Lower East Side tenement, bickering over the presence of their sister Miri’s Gentile suitor, Jimmy. In Act Two, fifty years later, Anna’s daughters Nell and Celia meet on a California beach before the wedding of Nell’s daughter Laurel. Linking the generations is the name Everett Beekin—Jimmy’s business partner and, later, Laurel’s prospective bridegroom Everett Beekin VIII. As the play unfolds, Everett Beekin becomes “a haunted, restless meditation on American rootlessness” (Ben Brantley, The New York Times).