My Uncle Sam

But he was also a larger- than-life figure, a mythic hero, to his nephew - who now seeks to discover his uncle's true story

His quest is a quixotic and picaresque one, involving a seductive night club singer who promises to marry Sam if he can locate his ne'er-do-well brother (who absconded with the proceeds from a robbery), and developing into a series of sometimes funny sometimes hair-raising episodes

The nephew "becomes" his uncle in his youth and journey's to a remote lighthouse, a rather sinister university laboratory, an opium den, the clinic of a Mexican quack, and a very odd miniature golf course-all intriguingly distorted, as though viewed through a funhouse mirror

In the end it is really the landscape of the mind which is explored and illuminated, as the trail leads back to Old Sam and the disquieting knowledge that dreams and reality are, in the final essence, often one and the same, with the "truth" still remaining tantalizingly out of reach

First presented by the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Public Theatre. Searching back in time to trace the story of the title character, the play pieces together a mosaic of short scenes - some wildly funny, some eerily menacing-into an antic yet biting commentary on the American experience

"Mr Jenkin's play is in the first place a loving but rarified pulp-fiction parody, full of ingenious and peculiar turns of language" ~ Village Voice

"Jenkin's plays are, in a sense, loony detective stories, a Pilgrim's progress through thickets of American hype and ignorance" ~ NY Daily News

"By the end of this imaginative evening, one could say that the play is a journey of self-discovery, a pop art fairy tale, or an investigation into the American psyche" ~ BackStage

" it's a wonderful piece, astonishingly imaginative and challenging" ~ The Bergen Record