Overview

Winner of five 2024 Tony Awards, including Best Play An epic play with music that examines the human costs of the quest for artistic greatness. The place: Sausalito. The time: the mid-1970s. The carpet: brown shag. Stereophonic brings us inside the cloistered world of a recording studio as a rock band on the brink of superstardom attempts to create their sophomore album. The ensuing pressures open up cracks in the band's once-easy camaraderie, and spats over issues like tempo and song length begin to reveal deeper problems in the band's foundation. Running on a diet of booze, sleep deprivation, and a giant bag of cocaine, interpersonal relationships are pushed to the breaking point as a process that was meant to last a few weeks becomes a neverending slog. With original songs by Arcade Fire's Will Butler, David Adjmi's play is an electrifying portrait of a band wracked with division and disillusionment that nevertheless might be on the verge of creating a masterpiece.

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9781636702162

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Reviews

"""The best play of the year is David Adjmi's shattering Stereophonic... And not just the year's best, but one of the best works of narrative art about the day-to-day grind and emotional toll of artistic creation."" --Washington Post ""However you want to categorize Stereophonic--perhaps a playical?--the great thing is that it doesn't founder, as most theatrical treatments of the artistic process do, on either side of the genre divide. The music justifies the long buildup, and the play, Adjmi's best so far, is as rich and lustrous as they come. You could even call it platinum."" --New York Times ""The heart of the play...lies in the minutiae: the coffee maker, the intricacies of a bass line, how to tune a snare drum. Stereophonic is constructed out of those hypernaturalistic details, with each little frustration along the way to an album building on the next, like a fugue, up to the points when those songs start to come together, the play breaks open, and, against all indications, incandescent art comes out."" --Vulture ""Does Stereophonic rock? It does, hard. Instant classic."" --Observer ""Feels like listening to a favorite LP: rich in content, dynamic in production, wondrous in effect, and worth playing over and over."" --Theaterly"

Author Information

David Adjmi'splays includeMarie Antoinette(Soho Rep, American Repertory Theater, Yale Repertory Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company),3C(Rattlestick Playwrights Theater),Elective Affinities(Royal Shakespeare Company, Soho Rep),Stunning(LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company),The Evildoers(Sundance, Yale Repertory Theatre),Caligula(Soho Rep Studio Series) andStrange Attractors(Empty Space). He was awarded a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers' Award, the Kesselring Fellowship a Steinberg Playwright Award and the Bush Artist Fellowship, among others. His memoirLot Sixwas published by HarperCollins in 2020. Will Butleris an American multi-instrumentalist and composer who is best known as a former member of the indie rock band Arcade Fire. He plays synthesizer, bass, guitar and percussion. In 2014, Butler was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score for his work on the original score of the filmHer. His latest albumWill Butler + Sister Squareswas released in September 2023 on Merge Records.

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