Synopsis
Shoppers - Two Plays by Denis Johnson - Hellhound on My Trail & Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames
Published by Perennial Publications
The character could be speaking for his creator, because human imperfection is one of Denis Johnson's specialties - in his critically acclaimed novels, short stories, and nonfiction, and, now, in two brilliant new plays
These two works present a dramatized field guide to some of the more dysfunctional and dysphoric inhabitants of the American West: a sexual-misconduct investigator who misconducts herself sexually; a renegade Jehovah's Witness who supports his splinter Jehovean group by dealing drugs
The Cassandra Brothers and their father and their grandmother, thrown together at a family reunion/wedding/melee at their shabby homestead in Ukiah, California.When Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames was performed in San Francisco in 2001
"There's an enormous appeal in Johnson's bleak-comic vision of a semi-mythic American West" ~ Chronicle
That appeal derives from the author's perfect vision of imperfection, embodied with such energy and courage in these marvelous pieces of theatre