Prayer for My Enemy

“America the addicted. America the numb. America the war weary. America the lonely. All these countries compose the jagged terrain of this viscerally potent new play.”—The Seattle Times

“The very best we can hope for is to show the mess of life in such a way as to perhaps awaken our shared capacity for embracing it, in all its beauty and terror.”—Craig Lucas

Craig Lucas “can masterfully distill a world of hurt and perplexity into complicated relations and single, pithy lines” (The Seattle Times), which is never more evident than in his latest play of public and private turmoil in today’s America. Here we find the Noone son Billy returns from Iraq, his pregnant sister Marianne marries Billy’s friend and former lover Tad, his mother Karen tries to keep her husband Austin from falling off the wagon—all while the Red Sox and Yankees battle for the 2004 pennant. With Prayer for My Enemy, Lucas returns to the dark territory he has explored with earlier works, “bringing light and craft to previously unlit corners,” and illuminating the ways he is “one of the American theater’s best writers” (Variety).

Craig Lucas is a playwright, screenwriter, and director of both theater and film. His plays include Prelude to a Kiss, The Dying Gaul, Small Tragedy, Blue Window, God’s Heart, The Singing Forest, and the book for the Tony Award–winning musical The Light in the Piazza. He is currently associate artistic director at the Intiman Theatre in Seattle.