Carver’s Pieces

Raymond Carver, a native of the Northwest, wrote some of the most powerful American fiction of the twentieth century, and his work still cleaves to and illuminates our American landscape. Adapted to the stage and directed by John Abramson, these three pieces, Fat, What’s In Alaska?, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love deal with the terrifying currents that flow through ordinary human life in this country. A powerful and acute look at the lives of everyday people thrown together in their isolation, desperately seeking a means to make sense of the incoherence of their suffering. Each story – a waitress serving a fat customer, two married couples getting high together, and a group of friends talking about love over gin and tonic -reveals Carver at his best; a resolute and unblinking look at the conditioning forces that scorch people’s lives, leaving them helplessly stranded with one another, and causing them to misunderstand life, even when it is plain and simple.