Skyscraper Lullaby (NHB Modern Plays)

James Fritz

Summary

A powerful drama about two parents trying to come to terms with the disappearance of their toddler, written and first performed as an audio drama for Audible Original.
As they recount the events surrounding the disappearance of their toddler – one with a tendency to bite – two parents cope with grief in vastly different ways. While the father wrestles with feelings of guilt, the mother is convinced she's spotted the boy in frightening TV news reports… though let's just say he looks nothing like the precocious little boy they remember from a decade ago.
James Fritz's Skyscraper Lullaby is a haunting examination of the ways we cope with tragedy, complicity, and remorse. It was first produced as an audio play for Audible Original in 2022.

Available since: 10/26/2023.

Print length: 50 pages.

Poetry & Theatre

Other books that might interest you

The Satires

Juvenal

The Roman poet Juvenal was the greatest satirist of Imperial Rome. His 16 satires encompass attacks on the immorality, abuses and hypocrisy of the Romans of his day. The last of the great Roman poets, he wrote between CE 110 and 130, his approach to satire coming close to modern expectations of the genre.
Today, Juvenal is best known for the Latin quotations panem et circenses (‘bread and races’ – he stated that this was all the Roman populace desired) and mens sana in corpore sano (‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’).
This audiobook, deftly delivered by David Timson, uses Niall Rudd’s translation, which preserves the style and metrical effect of Juvenal’s hexameters.

Show book

The Choephori

Aeschylus

Produced in 458 BC, Aeschylus' Choephori is the second play in the Oresteian trilogy. The bloodshed begun in the first play with the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra is here continued when Agamemnon's son Orestes avenges his father's death by killing Clytemnestra. It is not until the third and final play, Eumenides, that peace is restored to the family of the Atreidae. The introduction discusses the pre-Aeschylean 'Orestes' tradition in literature and art, as well as the place of Choephori within the Oresteia, its imagery and dramatic structure, the questions of staging the play, and the manuscript tradition.

Show book

Muses and Muscle Memory: The...

Chris-Ann Miche

This is a specially curated, abridged edition. The full, unabridged edition will be available soon.
In a world where we can feel so disconnected, bogged down by the motions and minutes that steal dreams and tuck the self out of sight, Muses and Muscle Memory: The Audio Experience invites you to sneak away and reconnect. There are moments — beautiful, chaotic, and in-between — that make us who we are; they're as ingrained as the bones beneath our skin. And there are muses — bursts or bodies — that inspire us to feel, to explore, to change, or to appreciate. But we need the space: to think, to remember, to create, or just to be.
Narrated by the author, Chris-Ann Miche, and sound designed by Joel Young, each poem pulls you into a vivid landscape of words, with sounds from everyday life, that ask you to sit, listen, breathe, and contemplate.
Touching on complicated themes like memory, grief, desire, love, fear, freedom, and more, Chris-Ann comes out of intellectual hiding to lead you through glimpses of her past and present, to give you a safe place to get lost, a secure place to feel, to linger in nostalgia, to explore longing and warmth, while considering what’s to come, away from the noise of the world.
In the words of RaeChelle-Faith Hamilton, "Chris-Ann truly has a gift. Her uncanny ability to pull you into her world, while evoking treasured moments from your own experiences, reflects empathy, and true craftsmanship. Her collection not only narrates her own life's questions, but beautifully and effectively reflects how we may also perceive the world, but are unable to find the words. Chris-Ann has not only found her voice but has managed to help us find our own.”

Show book

Evanescence

Harriet Prescott Spofford

Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford was a notable American writer remembered for her novels, poems and detective stories. This was the weekly poem for July 24-30, 2011.

Show book

Confessions of a MANAHOLIC

P. Pierre

Newfound love or paradise lost? This poetry book exposes it all. Follow P. Pierre through her many do-overs in love.

Show book

The Ruins of Nostalgia

Donna Stonecipher

What is it to feel nostalgia, to be skeptical of it yet cleave intently to the complex truths of feeling and thought? In a series of 64 gorgeous, ramifying, unsettling prose poems addressing late-twentieth- and twenty-first century experience and its discontents, The Ruins of Nostalgia offers a strikingly original exploration of the misunderstood phenomenon of nostalgia as both feeling-state and historical phenomenon. Each poem, also titled The Ruins of Nostalgia, is a kind of lyrical mini-essay, playful, passionate, analytic. Some poems take a location, memory, conceit, or object as their theme. Throughout the series, the poems recognize and celebrate the nostalgias they ironize, which are in turn celebrated and then ironized again. Written often in the fictional persona of the first-person plural, The Ruins of Nostalgia explores the rich territory where individual response meets a collective phenomenon.[sample poem]The Ruins of Nostalgia 13Where once there had been a low-end stationery store minded by an elderly beauty queen, there was now a store for high-end espresso machines minded by nobody. Where once there had been an illegal beer garden in a weedy lot, there was now a complex of luxury lofts with Parisian-style ivory façades. Where once there had been a bookstore and a bike shop and a bakery, there was now a wax museum for tourists. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been farms there were now subdivisions. Where once there had been subdivisions there were now sub-subdivisions. We lived in a sub-subdivision of a subdivision. We ourselves had become subdivided—where once we had merely been of two minds. * Where once there had been a river there was now a road. A vocal local group had started a movement to break up the road and "daylight" the river, which still flowed, in the dark, underneath the road. * Could we daylight the farms, the empty lots, the stationery store, the elderly beauty queen, the city we moved to? Was it still flowing somewhere, under the luxury lofts, deliquescing in the dark, inhabited by our luxury selves, not yet subdivided, because not yet whole? * Could we daylight the ruins of nostalgia?

Show book