Set in a sausage-making factory in the U.S. "somewhere in the past, " "Slaughter City" looks at the pressure and horrific working conditions of factory floor workers. Kentucky playwright Naomi Wallace prings sharp insight, political anger, and cool, graceful and poetic language to bloody and tension-filled circumstances.

Slaughter City

Literature & Fiction

Wallace, Naomi

Dramas & Plays

Faber&Faber

A collection of four plays by women - three British and one American.

Bush Theatre Plays: Keyboard Skills, Boys Mean Business, Two Lips Indifferent Red, One Flea Spare

Johnson, Catherine

Oglesby, Tamsin

Bruce, Lesley

Dalton Chance is 15 years old and an open book. Pace Creagan, aged 17, is fearless and feared, and to Dalton, she's irresistible. A poetic, Depression-era play by a prize-winning writer; a coming-of-age story with a wicked twist that reaches into the depths of a nation and asks what lies beneath.

Trestle at Pope Lick Creek

Faber and Faber

Two imprisoned young women, one African American and the other white, form a perilous bond. As they serve time they forge a plan for survival. They practice hard. If they don't get it right they'll lose everything: the outside world is even more dangerous to their friendship than the jail itself. Exploring the fierce dreams of youth and the brutal reality of adulthood in 1950's segregated America, Naomi Wallace's And I and Silence premiered at the Finborough Theatre, London, in May 2011.

And I and Silence

You haven't asked, but yes, you both may stay in our house for the time being. And use our things. I figure it'll take a war to settle it all. A compelling story of two families - one Palestinian, one Israeli - forced by history into an intimacy they didn't choose. In 1948, Palestinian couple Said and Safiyya fled their home during the Nakba. Now, in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, the borders are open for the first time in twenty years, and they dare to return to their home in Haifa. They are ready to find someone else living where they once did, but nothing can prepare them for the encounter they both desire and dread with the son they had to leave behind. Ghassan Kanafani's classic novella Returning to Haifa has been adapted for the stage by Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi. The play premiered at the Finborough Theatre, London, in February 2018 to coincide with the seventieth anniversaries of both the Nakba or 'catastrophe' - the mass dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 - and the foundation of the State of Israel. '[ Returning to Haifa ] offers a moving confrontation between two sets of displaced people and an utterly unsentimental exploration of the complexities of home, history and parenthood... its call for reciprocal awareness and acknowledgement of past injustice seems more necessary than ever.' Guardian '...As quietly shattering as it is gently complex.' WhatsOnStage 'The adaptation demonstrates the control power and pain exert over individual lives.' Upcoming 'An electrifying eighty minutes of theatre...The beauty of the writing lies in the amalgam of the political and the personal; the connection between individual and global struggles.' Spy In The Stalls 'Kanafani's parable of this contested land is even-handed enough to explore the agony of both the exiled Palestinian couple and the Jewish widow...and to empathize with all of them.' Jewish Renaissance ' Returning to Haifa is a beautiful and important play portraying the personal tragedies created because of much bigger acts between humans.' E xeunt Magazine

Returning to Haifa

Khalidi, Ismail

The Breach

The Return of Benjamin Lay

Rediker, Marcus

"I sat in a theater at the Humana Festival last year, after the closing monologue of ONE FLEA SPARE, unable to move. I had known Naomi Wallace's work well, having directed an earlier play, and I knew she had tremendous talent and promise to do great things. Nothing had prepared me - not my admiration for her plays and for her beautiful, harsh, moving, brilliantly political poetry - for the experience of watching this play, which is in my opinion one of the finest works of dramatic literature written here or in England in the last two decades. Utterly without sentiment but possessed of a very great human heart, ONE FLEA SPARE touches upon many things, class and gender and the pressures of a plague upon internal and external human constructs; and, as I read it, most devastatingly it addresses a tragedy of almost inexpressible dimensions: the consequences of the horrors of biology and Capital on the young. As the play draws to its shattering close I was filled with thoughts of the children of Sarajevo and Rwanda and the slums of America. 'Almost' inexpressible except in the hands of a true poet, and Naomi Wallace so magnificently proves herself to be. Her ability to articulate the inarticulable, grief and loss and suffering beyond endurance, is a source of hope; as is the resilience and passion of the marvelous characters she's assembled. Everyone who loves the theater should read this play. It has made me INTENSELY envious and very full of joy." -Tony Kushner "Naomi Wallace sharply tightens her focus in this latest, thrillingly original work, set for the most part in a virtually bare London room during the Great Plague." -Jeremy Kingston, The Times (London) "Poetic ... Naomi Wallace's ONE FLEA SPARE is another example of fine, ambitious writing ... The London plague is evoked in statistics and the overwhelming reality of quirky, Marivaux-like social role reversals in a single room." -Michael Coveney, The Observer (London) "Naomi Wallace makes an opaque but artful and haunting New York debut with her ONE FLEA SPARE ... ONE FLEA SPARE is built to provoke, not to distract, and it doesn't surrender its meanings easily. But the play's powerful sexual subtext and its beautiful poetic surface reveal an original theatrical imagination. Whether Wallace will find a big audience remains to be seen. She has a big talent, though. Wherever her plays are mounted, they're worth finding." -John Lahr, The New Yorker

One Flea Spare

Naomi Wallace

Broadway Play Publishing, Incorporated

Dalton Chance is 15 years old and an open book. Pace Creagan, aged 17, is fearless and feared, and to Dalton, she's irresistible. High atop a railroad trestle that spans a bone dry creek, two teenagers plan to race across the bridge against an oncoming locomotive. At first their scheme adds excitement to life in a small factory town during the Great Depression, then sensual experience awakens dangerous passions in an era of stifled ambitions. With theatrical flourish and lyrical finesse, Naomi Wallace delves into a world where people struggle to change lives that bear down upon them. "… Naomi Wallace, the thirty-eight-year-old Kentucky playwright at work here, received a MacArthur 'genius grant' last week, and TRESTLE AT POPE LICK CREEK, her lovely, strikingly poetic Depression-era play … certainly illustrates what makes her deserving … the play sometimes seems like a blend of Ingmar Bergman and Horton Foote, with Thornton Wilder on the side … TRESTLE is set in 1936 in a in a town so dull that the only thing young people can pit themselves against, the only thing greater than them, is the 7:10 train with its 153-ton engine and deafening roar. So we find Dalton and Pace, who becomes his girlfriend despite his repeated insistence that she is not pretty, making plans to test themselves by trying to outrun the train on a trestle a hundred feet above a dry creek bed. Another boy from their town tried it recently and died … By the end, the play, like that train, has built up a full head of steam and we feel its power." -Anita Gates, The New York Times "… TRESTLE is an often poignant, nonlinear-narrative coming-of-age story that's set in 1936 in a 'town outside a city, somewhere in the United States … TRESTLE is at once charming and haunting … you'll view it with wonder along the way." -Sam Whitehead, Time Out "… The honor for the most original and memorable work of this year's 22nd Humana Festival goes to another Kentuckian, Naomi Wallace, for her brilliant THE TRESTLE AT POPE LICK CREEK … After the two-act play ended with an erotic, gender-twisted climax, there was a moment in the darkness when I thought: 'This must be how it felt when people saw A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE for the very first time.' Like Tennessee Williams's daring play, Wallace's work introduces a new level of sexual honesty with a fresh mature voice. TRESTLE wraps its five characters in a metaphorical drama within a romantic and tragic mystery. It's a complicated, interwoven play that moves back and forth in time between past and present, with layers of meaning that overlap and build upon each other. Despite its depth of symbolism and clear political message, the play is neither stuffy nor strident. A bright ripple of humor funs through Wallace's play about two sexually charged young people who consider a game of chicken with an oncoming train. Wallace's keen psychological insights evoke compassion for her characters. Tears are shed and not only over the pathos of the play … The actors stir the emotions with the tender way they expose the fragility and indomitable beauty of the human spirit, as revealed through Wallace's words … If Wallace's plays were a visual art, ONE FLEA SPARE would be a baroque oil painting, while THE TRESTLE AT POPE LICK CREEK would be a 1930s American photograph with contrasting lights and shadows and its direct, unsentimental and uncensored gaze into the lives of the working class." -Judith Egerton, Courier-Journal, Louisville

The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek

In this witty adventure for young audiences by MacArthur “genius” award winner Naomi Wallace, a young girl called Noil finds herself in a strange new place, and must accomplish three and a half magical tasks before she can return home. Noil is clever and resourceful, and with some assistance from a singing narrator and a talking roach, she emerges from the hole in her sweater in time for breakfast.This play can be performed with as few as seven actors, and several roles are suitable for male or female performers.Naomi Wallace’s other plays include THE FEVER CHART, IN THE HEART OF AMERICA, ONE FLEA SPARE, SLAUGHTER CITY, THE TRESTLE AT POPE LICK CREEK and THE WAR BOYS.

The Girl Who Fell Through a Hole in Her Sweater

McLeod, Bruce

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Books by Wallace, Naomi