Shoppers Carried by Escalators into the Flames

Shoppers Carried by Escalators into the Flames is Denis Johnson’s foray into family dynamics. The play begins with a man returning to his family’s home in Ukiah, California, to await a bed in rehab. Placed in a super-real landscape shared with a decrepit invisible Chihuahua no one will claim and a human-inhabited ‘new’ TV that intermittently provokes the family and offers news reports of burning underground shopping malls, the family moves through their rituals of revelry and avoidance.