4000 Miles / After the Revolution - by Amy Herzog (Paperback)

About the Book

Two plays by "one of the brightest new talents in the theatre" (New York Times).

Book Synopsis

"After the Revolution is a smart, funny and provocative play...Herzog deftly avoids simple-minded polemics in favor of richly detailed people who are as ready to examine their relationships as they are their consciences." --Variety

"A funny, moving new play...4000 Miles is a quiet meditation on mortality. But it's hardly a downer: Ms. Herzog's altogether wonderful drama also illuminates how companionship can make life meaningful, moment by moment, in death's discomforting shadow." --New York Times

Known for delicately detailed character studies that subtly balance humor and insight, Amy Herzog is swiftly emerging as a striking new voice in the American theater. After the Revolution, an astute and ironic drama about how society appropriates history for its own psychological needs, was heralded by The New York Times as one of the Ten Best New Plays of 2010. Herzog's other critical hit, 4000 Miles, is a quiet rumination on mortality in which twenty-one-year-old Leo seeks solace from his feisty ninety-one-year-old grandmother Vera in her New York apartment.

Review Quotes

"Herzog unravels the details slowly, with uncommon narrative skill...Everything about 4000 Miles seems fresh, particularized, plausible...The family drama that really sticks with you. Easily the best play of the season."

--Richard Zoglin, Time

"Herzog's wonderful play about growing up and finding home has only ripened over time. 4000 Miles is one of the best, bravest plays of the season. See it no matter how far you must travel."

--David Cote, Time Out New York

"Plays as truthful and touching and fine as Amy Herzog's 4000 Miles come along once or maybe twice a season, if we're lucky...A beautifully rendered portrait of the relationship between an old-style lefty grandmother and her new-style lefty grandson...This is the rare theatrical production that achieves perfection on its own terms."

--Charles Isherwood, New York Times

"Amy Herzog is an intelligent, delicately articulate writer with a piquant, arresting subject...Encounters of the kind Herzog graphs, compassionately, among left-thinking people, end irresolutely, or dissipate into nothing, giving her play the unresolved, undramatic quality of a set of short stories. Like the landed gentry who populate Chekhov's plays, Herzog's people are conscious of a large absence in their lives, but not wholly able to define it...She has a naturalistic delicacy of detail."

--Michael Feingold, Village Voice

"The best new play by a young writer...Part of its excellence arises from the seemingly paradoxical fact that Ms. Herzog has had the good sense not to make 4000 Miles a political drama...It is, instead, a finely wrought, closely observed character study, funny
and serious in just the right proportions."

--Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal

About the Author

Amy Herzog's plays include 4000 Miles (Lincoln Center Theater's LCT3, upcoming at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center), After the Revolution (Williamstown Theatre Festival, Playwrights Horizons; John Gassner Award nomination, Lilly Award), Hungry (Ensemble Studio Theatre), and Belleville (Yale Rep). She has had readings/workshops at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Manhattan Theatre Club, New York Stage and Film, Arena Stage, and Soho Rep, among others. She holds commissions from Yale Rep and Playwrights Horizons and is an alumna of Youngblood, Play Group, and the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab; a Helen Merrill Award recipient, a former Playwrights' Realm Fellow, and Playwright-in-Residence at Ars Nova in 2010. She has taught playwriting at Bryn Mawr and Yale. Amy received her MFA from Yale School of Drama.