Stone Cold Dead Serious

A pinball wizard for the twenty-first century, Wynne Ledbetter is surrounded by despair. His father is wasting away on workman’s comp, his mother is a double-shift waitress obsessed with the lives of the saints, and his sister is a dropout junky. But Wynne has a plan. One of only three players in the country to solve the Tang Dynasty computer game, he will travel to the championships in New York City, where the winner pockets a cool million dollars. With this money, he’ll put his sister in rehab, pay for his father’s operation, and employ his mother in his very own computer repair shop. But he has to get there first.

STONE COLD DEAD SERIOUS…is the work of a playwright who is forging a real voice… Its rendering of the shared language of loved ones illustrates how families can remain intimate even when they are in shards. Its depiction of a working-class America that is unable to dream of anything beyond enduring is as sincerely sad a commentary on our culture as I’ve seen in recent memory. And its fear for young people is, unfortunately, deeply convincing.

Bruce Weber, The New York Times