Only you and I will know that we Topped Their Love. Love has no limits for the Diggs siblings: there's nothing that seventeen-year-old Jude won't do to keep her younger brother Acton safe. But when Acton's troublesome pals form a club in their basement, a foolish game threatens to upend Jude's plans and derail their lives forever.
Set in 1950s segregated America, the story follows two young women, one African American and the other white, who form a deep bond while imprisoned. As they navigate their harsh reality, they devise a survival plan that highlights the dangers they face both inside and outside of jail. The narrative explores themes of friendship, unspoken love, and the stark contrast between youthful dreams and adult despair. Naomi Wallace's poignant play captures the complexity of their relationship with a blend of humor and tragedy, ultimately revealing the resilience of hope amidst adversity.
Set in plague-ravaged 17th century London where social roles and the boundaries that describe them have been into chaos. The definition of morality is up for grabs. History is being tantalised. And whilst the wealthy William Snelgrave dreams of sweating, swearing tars, and of how sailors satisfy their "baser instincts" so far away from female company, his own wife, untouched for 40 years, is discovering that her dreadfully burned body may not be numb after all. The human heart craves comfort, contact, tenderness; survival may take many forms
The story follows three childhood friends who take on the role of vigilantes patrolling the U.S./Mexican border. As they navigate their fantasies of heroism, they confront the complexities of identity and belonging. The narrative challenges their perceptions of American identity and raises questions about who truly has the right to belong, highlighting the porous nature of borders and the moral dilemmas faced by those who enforce them.
"On the docks of late 18th-century Rhode Island, two runaway slaves, Adjua and Dembi, plan a desperate and daring run to freedom. When a chance encounter triggers an unexpected collision of worlds, painful truths are uncovered, and the brutality of past crimes spills into the next generation"--publisher's description
"It's not just the blood-spattered slaughterhouse setting that makes the Royal Shakespeare Company's SLAUGHTER CITY an unusually meaty (you'll forgive the expression) new play. Aligning issues of class and race and labor dynamics to a surrealist aesthetic as elusive as her politics are straightforward, American writer Naomi Wallace shows a willingness to embrace topics once treated by the likes of Clifford Odets and Sophie Treadwell. These days, such terrain is left to the movies--Paul Schrader's Blue Collar, among others--but the pulse of Wallace's writing is of and for the theater. Hers may not be the most audience-friendly of voices, but even her opacity commands attention." Matt Wolf, Variety "Naomi Wallace's SLAUGHTER CITY, which gets its premiere in The Pit, is a strange and compelling play that unties two elements in the American tradition--the radical and the mystic. If it reminds me of anyone it is the Walt Whitman who wrote of 'the audacity of freedom' and the need for America to free itself from the anti-democratic European past. On the radical level, the play is a passionate protest against exploitation... ...the play has passion, poetry and a wild strangeness. Wallace also writes highly effective individual scenes... Most cheering of all is Wallace's adventurous attempt to redefine political drama in terms of a feminist surrealism." Michael Billington, The Guardian
Appalachian-born Craver and Palestinian-American Remzi bond in a way characteristic of soldiers, but their relationship seamlessly blends into intimacy and homoeroticism, without ever becoming explicitly sexual, in Naomi Wallace's exploration of the body as means for love and a tool of war. "IN THE HEART OF AMERICA is a pretty startling piece of writing. It has the driving political anger and entwining of the personal and political that marked some of the best British writing of the early seventies, the vigor and mystical overtones of raw Sam Shepard, and the grace and sensuality of a poet... The landscape here is the barren, burned-out emptiness of history's war zones, and the talk is relentlessly of death and destruction. But there is also love." Lyn Gardner, The Guardian (London)
As a poisoned city disintegrates around them, three men, almost strangers, meet in a Louisville hotel room to plan an ugly crime against Rubbertown's most powerful industry. "The most politically engaged playwright of her generation." -Variety