The Glory of Living

The award-winning, viscerally powerful (The Guardian) early play by the author of Spinning Into Butter and Boy Gets Girl

Set in the rural Deep South, Rebecca Gilman’s The Glory of Living received critical acclaim rare for a new American play when it had its British premiere in 1999, garnering the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. Set to open in New York in the fall of 2001, this work focuses on fifteen-year-old Lisa, the daughter of a prostitute, and Clint, the car thief she runs away with to escape the misery of life with her mother. But the happier times that sullenly childlike Lisa yearns for never materialize, as Clint orders her to procure young runaways for him. No one notices that these teenage girls are missing until an anonymous call to the police reports their murders. Could the caller–and the killer–be Lisa? Rebecca Gilman has created a riveting, unsentimental portrait of a young woman whose most striking quality is not her capacity for evil but the depth of her emptiness, in an environment as harsh and unyielding as the contours of her life