Ghosts in the Cottonwoods

On the night of a terrible storm, a single mother and her younger son await the arrival of the older son, who has broken out of prison. Two others arrive before him: a stranger with a wounded leg and a girl with a suitcase. Nothing will ever be the same. Adam Rapp’s play … is just the ticket - brutal Southern Midwest grotesque, otherworldly and darkly human. It takes place on a stormy night, in a one-room house furnished with scavenged car parts and a PVC-pipe kitchen zoo table; as the play begins, Bean Scully is sucking the leech welts on her naked teen-age son’s body. Her other son, Jeff, has busted out of prison and is making his way home, and as the night goes on, various wanderers - a man with a bullet in his leg, a pregnant teen, two half-mute desperadoes - show up and wreak incredible havoc. Rapp’s dialogue is beautiful mayhem, full of mudslops and dogsnakes and hog gravy, and we care just enough about these strange souls to be devastated by their pain. Though neither Rapp nor the company nor the audience may ever understand what this work is doing or why, it jolts and haunts all involved in its happy amoralism. -The New Yorker Adam Rapp’s GHOSTS IN THE COTTONWOODS … is without question some of the most raw and intestine twisting theater happening in New York City. -Slant Magazine