A collection of Ed Schmidt's groundbreaking one-person plays for small audiences.
When The Last Supper opened in 2003, the New York Times wrote, "You should be prepared to have your every expectation of theater subverted." That play, in which Schmidt cooks a three-course meal for an audience of twelve, was a critical smash and ran for two sold-out years.
In My Last Play, first performed in Schmidt's living room, he announces his retirement from the theater and, over the course of the seemingly improvised play, gives away his collection of over 2,000 theater books, one volume at a time. Time Out New York called it a "monument to the persistence of art," and the run ended when the shelves were bare.
In Our Last Game — originally performed in a cramped, claustrophobic locker room in Manhattan's East Village — Schmidt plays a high school basketball coach and the audience assumes the role of his team. The play spans the coach's forty-year career, running backwards in time.
These "bizarre and truly bold experiments in form and manipulation" (New York Times) are unlike anything you've read or seen. Schmidt's plays remind us "that even when everything appears lost in theater, we never lose faith in it" (New York Observer).