Up next from 53rd State —
KILLING OF A GENTLEMAN DEFENDER
by Carlos Murillo
In some rooms he’s Martin. In others he’s Martín. Hired by a well-funded arts institution on Chicago’s Northside to create a show with Chicago youth about violence on the Southside, Marteen finds himself torn not only by the pronunciation of his name, but by the conflicting needs of the institution and the young people it believes its “serving,” and by a city in a death struggle with its own divided self. Reaching into his own history, he unearths, with his young ensemble, the story of the 1994 murder of soccer star Andres Escobar in Medellín, Colombia, hoping a past-tense allegory of violence in a deeply divided, faraway city will illuminate violence in the deeply divided Chicago of today. Carlos Murillo’s brilliant, rigorous play is haunted and haunting, its meticulously rendered ghosts layered one atop another like history, like lace.
Commissioned by the @goodmantheatre (Robert Falls, Artistic Director, 2015)
Winner of the Kernodle New Play Award, University of Arkansas, (2018)
Forthcoming in May 2026
FUTURES: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY ARAB THEATER
Ed. by Yasser Abu Shaqra and Agnes Borinsky • with plays by Yasser Abu Shaqra, Wael Kadour, Arzé Khodr, Rim Mejdi, Nasr Sami, & Leila Toubel • translated by Hisham Ben Khamsa, Jonas Elbousty, Caline Nasrallah, and Clem Naylor
December 2025
$25
400 pages
5.5x7.5 inches
Now available for preorder at 53rdstatepress.org
An anthology of six new plays written in Arabic, published here in English translation. Including five plays selected from over 500 submissions to Masrah Ensemble’s 2021 Open Call and one by Masrah Ensemble’s former playwright-in-residence, these six texts—by Yasser Abu Shaqra, Wael Kadour, Arzé Khodr, Rim Mejdi, Nasr Sami, and Leila Toubel—represent a diverse array of voices and styles, and push at the limits of theatrical form and public discourse. The volume features an introduction by theater writer/director/academic Hanan Kassab Hassan along with short introductions to the plays by US-based playwrights Lucas Baisch, Jess Barbagallo, Jordan Baum, Agnes Borinsky, Nazareth Hassan, and Haruna Lee.
@yasser_abushaqra@hanankassabhassan@waelkadour@arzekhodr@rim_mejdi@toubelleila@lucbaisch@jessmbarbagallo@naznaznazznaznaznazz@teenyteenylee
Now available for preorder on our website:
A FIELD OF TELEPHONES
Zach Savich
$16
A beautiful book best captured by this lovely blurb from Adrienne Raphel @adrienne.raphel —
If a telephone rings and no one hears, did a tree fall in the same shaggy dog story twice? A Field of Telephones is a book of rhymes and counter-rhymes, criticism and closet drama, all teetering in the same trench coat. Every action has a chain reaction: “A triggering town,” for Savich, triggers “a brigadier clown, a Frigidaire swan.” There’s no there there, there’s no air air, here’s an aye aye for an eye, highway robbery. Adjunct firefighters have well-endowed poles. This is a mind-bendingly tender lecture (plus Q&A) on Theodore Roethke, with a break for coffee and synonym bums between the poetic feet (literally - the phones and phonemes are shoes. All soles rejoice!). “Poetry is mostly tone… a dial tone… pretending to be speech…” I can’t help but hear Charles Bernstein, reciting the yellow pages: “Fence. Fence. Fence.” A Field of Telephones also isn’t not a book about cancer. Tumors rear their heads, recede, rears, recede. Yet the form itself is cancerous, but in a benign sense: sounds multiplying into ideas, associations riffing into references, alliterations ballooning. It’s “pure pun-logic, pier pin Legos, pour pine Legolas, a pioneer pineal jig.” If this is hold music, play on.
Order at the link in our bio 📚
Praise for KILLING OF A GENTLEMAN DEFENDER, out in May 2026.
🌀
No contemporary playwright reckons with history’s rhythms and rhymes quite so adventurously as Carlos Murillo. Killing of a Gentleman Defender renders a searing account of the ineffable power—and intrinsic—limits of theatermaking as a tool to confront the violence shaping our presents, our pasts, and our futures.
—Brian Herrera, Associate Professor of Theatre, Princeton University
Like the best plays, Murillo’s Killing of a Gentleman Defender offers no easy answers or meta-whatever-fors. Deeply theatrical in how it spans time and place, the personal and the political collide in Gentleman Defender subverting expectation until delivering on its promise in heartbreaking poeticism.
—Eliza Bent, Writer/Performer
A funny, sharp and smart script that asks questions about the role of storyteller, artist, and audience. Killing of a Gentleman Defender is an impressive ensemble piece. Just when you think you know where it’s headed, the play surprises you in multiple ways. It makes you think about it for a very, very long time after leaving the theater.
—Ike Holter, playwright
A play by Carlos Murillo is like a Nirvana record. It looks around and all it sees is people destroying one another, as if destruction is the only thing they know how to do. So the play gets loud about it. At the same time, it sees that these wretched people, who can only make bad decisions, are like everyone you know. The play won’t break eye contact with them. That’s when it gets quiet. A play by Carlos Murillo is impossible to live with, and as soon as it’s over, you want it to start again.
—Rob Handel, Chair of Dramatic Writing, Carnegie Mellon University
FUTURES is here.
An anthology of six new plays written in Arabic, published here in English translation. Including five plays selected from over 500 submissions to Masrah Ensemble’s 2021 Open Call and one by Masrah Ensemble’s former playwright-in-residence, these six texts—by Yasser Abu Shaqra, Wael Kadour, Arzé Khodr, Rim Mejdi, Sami Nasr, and Leila Toubel—represent a diverse array of voices and styles, and push at the limits of theatrical form and public discourse.
Available now in our online bookshop at 53rdstatepress.org — linked in our bio.
@yasser_abushaqra@hanankassabhassan@waelkadour@arzekhodr@rim_mejdi@toubelleila@kremerkate
Today marks the start of #ReadPalestine Week! We are participating by making available for download a free PDF of Yasser Abu Shaqra’s wry, mordant, devastating LEFT OUT GONE BAD, via the link in our bio, alongside 27 other gorgeous books. @publishers4palestine
Now back in print: Carlos Murillo’s THE JAVIER PLAYS and Catherine Theis’ MEDEA.
Catch up on The Javier Plays before the release of Carlos’ KILLING OF A GENTLEMAN DEFENDER, forthcoming from 53rd State in 2026! And if you loved MEDEA, run over to @antiphonyajournal to grab a copy of Catherine’s latest, BY A ROMAN.
Both titles now available in our bookshop, linked in bio.
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Carlos Murillo’s mind-bending trilogy slips in and out of apocrypha and meta-fiction. Abundantly annotated with five essays and three plays, this beautifully intricate set of works find, lose, loosen, and reanimate, composing from the truth and lies of a deep, weird America. Plays include: Diagram of a Paper Airplane, A Thick Description of Harry Smith (Vol.1), and Your Name Will Follow You Home.
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Through a mix of sound-poems, dance, and traditional scenes, Catherine Theis attempts to jostle Medea from her traditional, male-defined narrative in this modern retelling set in the mountains of Montana. A 2015 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers finalist, MEDEA features a Chorus of Flames, choreography for The Milky Way, and a collection of palate-cleansing satyr plays to be performed after. Grappling with both love and language, Theis’ Medea “wants to join with the world, to meld with it. Let’s let her do that—see what falls away.”
#53rdStatePress #CarlosMurillo #CatherineTheis #indiepublishing
A note from editor Kate Kremer, celebrating the life of Rachel Jendrzejewski, who passed away on July 14 2025.
*
I have been struggling to find a way to write about Rachel’s life, which so exceeds—in joy, in love, in beauty, in rigor—any words I can find to describe it. I have been afraid of the form of the eulogy, I think, because I imagined it asking for summation, when I felt that Rachel herself refused to summarize, that her writing was intransigently specific, particular, and shimmeringly alive.
I should of course have known that I could look to Rachel’s own writing for help, as in these lines from Early Morning Song:
“TWO:
I’m working on archiving my whole life.
My whole life to this point.
FOUR:
And actually, beyond this point.
I’m working on archiving my whole life.
TWO:
I’m gathering up this life and then archiving it.
Well not “then” – I’m doing both, at the same time.
It’s better that way, like cleaning as you cook.”
Or in these, from Passion:
“10. Eyes, wide, adjusting.
11. I’m thinking of you. I almost thought I saw you outside, coming in, and my heart—
12. Eyes, looking down. Feeling the rough edges of my fingernails.
13. Casting back over the day—the things that got done, the things that didn’t get done. The list of things to remember not to forget.
14. I remember her pointing out the managing, the tracking that’s always happening, constantly. Sometimes consciously, but more often, in the background.”
Also, I think I have been afraid of the containment that I felt a eulogy implied. When what I want is for Rachel’s life to keep on going. For her influence to keep lighting up this little field, this brutal world. As in these lines from Meronymy:
“Suddenly CONTEXT smashes a window. Everything goes silent. Through the busted window, lace comes pouring inside the house. Gobs and gobs of lace, everywhere, in an instant, filling up the house.”
I should of course have known that when I miss her—as I now so desperately do—a part of her is still there, singing, my gentle, fierce, brave, and luminous friend. — k
Don’t miss The Essentialsn’t by @eisadavis at @herearts next month! We are publishing this text, out in early 2026, and are so excited for the premiere. Ticket link in our bio.
The Essentialsn’t
SEPT 10 - 28
Written and Performed by Eisa Davis
HERE World Premiere
Can you be Black and not perform? Incorporating art gallery aesthetics and an electronic soul score, Eisa Davis performs a piece about performance, exploring the cultural techniques that make musical expression a kind of imprisonment – or a transcendent liberation.
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The Essentialisn’t was originally commissioned by Laura Kaminsky at Symphony Space with funding from the Virginia B Toulmin Foundation. The piece has been supported and developed by The Public Theater, The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, The Park Avenue Armory, Christopher Hibma at Sundance Theater Lab, New Georges, Performance Space New York, United States Artists Fellowship, Jack NY, and Creative Capital Foundation.
Can’t wait to be back at the @bombmag Small Press Flea next month with some of our favorite fellow publishers 📚 Link to RSVP in our bio.
Small Press Flea is a summer market that supports the press community and independent publishers. This year’s SPF promises to provide your end-of-summer reading, workshops, and food vendors. The day ends with a night market featuring cocktails and a DJ.
Rain or shine, unless it’s pouring, 1 PM–9 PM.
Enter at 316 Ten Eyck St.
Participating publishers —
e-flux, 53rd State Press, A Public Space, Belladonna*, Birds, LLC, Black Sun Lit / Vestiges, Common Notions, Inpatient Press, McPherson & Company, n+1, Nightboat, Pioneer Works, Poets & Traitors Press, Seven Stories Press, Ugly Duckling Presse, Verso Books, Wendy’s Subway, Wonder Press, 8-Ball, Anarchist Review of Books, Archipelago Books, OR Books, Secret Riso Club, The Baffler, Winter Editions, World Poetry, Autonomedia, Joyland Editions, Radix Media, Some Other Books, and Burnaway
Behind the scenes with BOWLAHOOLA rehearsal!
Bowlahoola unfolds as a sequence of five monologues in the conditional tense. What could happen, what might have happened, what we wish would happen: these hypotheticals emerge from and chafe against the harrowing conditions we’re living in. Travestying the legal tool of the hypo, crisscrossing centuries and continents, taking up questions of abortion, privacy, white feminism, preemptive warfare, climate catastrophe, and the carceral state, Bowlahoola weaves and tangles what ifs until it becomes impossible to anchor any speaker in a particular identity. Instead, the monologues—performed by longtime collaborators Kate Kremer and Bryce Payne—become portraits of the ways we privilege hypothetical over actual lives, and the real devastations that result.
5pm May 31
Flow Chart Space
348 Warren Street, Hudson
Tix link in bio
Bowlahoola is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.”
Done by 6:30, so you can get dinner after and still make the last train back to the city!
ONE WEEK FROM TODAY
Bowlahoola: A Performance in a Conditional Mood!
Saturday, May 31st at 5pm
Flow Chart Space
(348 Warren Street, Hudson NY)
$8/$5(student/senior)
Register or read the interview about the show via the link.tree in our bio
Bowlahoola unfolds as a sequence of five monologues in the conditional tense. What could happen, what might have happened, what we wish would happen: these hypotheticals emerge from and chafe against the harrowing conditions we’re living in.
Travestying the legal tool of the hypo, crisscrossing five centuries and five continents, taking up questions of abortion, privacy, white feminism, preemptive warfare, climate catastrophe, and the carceral state, Bowlahoola weaves and tangles what ifs until it becomes impossible to anchor any speaker in a particular identity. Instead, the monologues—performed by longtime collaborators Kate Kremer and Bryce Payne—become portraits of the ways we privilege hypothetical over actual lives, and the real devastations that result.
This version of Bowlahoola, specially created for The Flow Chart Foundation, will run about an hour and fifteen minutes.
Bowlahoola is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
