The Unmentionables

Yale Repertory Theatre presents Bruce Norris’s incisive comedy The Unmentionables, staged by Anna D. Shapiro, who directed the play’s 2006 world premiere at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre.

Tensions reach a boiling point on the equator when Americans filled with beneficence and missionary zeal clash with each other and the local residents of an African town. A wealthy entrepreneur, Christian charity workers, an exasperated doctor, a flamboyant government official, and an abrasive teenager become entangled in a scathingly funny web of good intentions and selfish motives. Bruce Norris’s incisive comedy exposes those unmentionable things that we hide when we do the right thing for the wrong reasons.