Lascivious Something/Roadkill Confidential/That Pretty Pretty; Or, The Rape Play

Book excerpt: Sheila Callaghan is one of the most distinctive playwrights working in the theater today. Fiercely political, unblinkingly experimental, yet emotionally true, her writing is a refreshing combination of the compelling and the controversial. This volume collects three of her most recent plays to date. It includes: Lascivious Something, a heart-rending and disturbing exploration of failed love and shattered idealism at the dawn of the Reagan era, it follows a lapsed activist’s attempt to start life anew on a vineyard in Greece and what happens when the woman he left behind tracks him down; Roadkill Confidential, a noir-ish meditation on brutality and the intersection between fear and art, focused on an artist who uses the corpses of dead animals found on the side of the road as the medium for her creations; and That Pretty Pretty; Or, the Rape Play, which imagines our girls gone wild culture spiraling out to its most extreme ends while exploring issues of beauty, objectification, perversity, and naturalism in current society.