Prayer for My Enemy

Drama Characters: 3 male, 3 female Set Requirement: Simple Prayer for my Enemy was produced Off-Broadway as part of the 2008-2009 Season at Playwrights Horizons. In Prayer for my Enemy, two middle-class families in suburban New York State confront their private demons against the public backdrop of the American incursion into Iraq. As their paths cross in ways that are both comic and terrifying, lies and secrets are at last exposed and an honest, hard-earned redemption is achieved for both. A newly-minted classic. -The New York Times Craig Lucas’s Prayer for My Enemy is a game of hide-and-seek, in which the command of Lucas’s writing works as a kind of unspoken promise to the audience: in this series of opaque, impressionistic moments in one family’s turmoil, something will be found. The apparent ‘enemy’ of the title is the bumbling, bombastic Austin Noone, a bipolar Vietnam vet, whose mania has held his family hostage for decades and seems finally to be in abeyance. ‘I thank God every day, I hit my knees first and last thing, for this second chance,’ Austin, who’s in A.A. and six years sober, says. ‘I didn’t deserve it, but…’ The rueful voice of his daughter, Marianne, chimes in. ‘We did,’ she says.‘ Prayer for My Enemy ends with an elegiac hymn to devotion, but the play dramatizes a far less comforting thought, one that Austin articulates from his coma. 'Hell is truth seen too late,’ he says. -John Lahr, The New Yorker