My play DOUBLE SERPENT is out May 1st from Ugly Duckling Presse. Available for Pre Order now from
@uglyducklingpresse and
@asterism_books .
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In a penthouse in Manhattan, Connor plays dead for his wealthy older boyfriend Felix. Elsewhere, in a dark, wet basement in 1999, he plays Double Serpent with his invisible friend while he waits for Fake Dad to be done with his business upstairs.
Using a brilliant triple-helix structure, Sam Max’s playscript threads fantasy together with Connor’s past and present, creating a thriller in which there are Fake Dads and real daddies, surgery and blood play, childhood scarring and adulthood dissociation. In Double Serpent, sex and intimacy both redeem and reinflict.
An interview between Sam Max and Derek McCormack
@derek_mccormack accompanies the playscript.
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"Double Serpent is a disquieting fever dream from one of America’s freshest theatrical minds that will haunt you for days after you encounter it."
— Jordan Tannahill
“Wriggly, complicated, dense, beautiful, and so tight. I’ve read it so many times, and every time I get flashes of understanding, I reject them. I don’t want to understand it fully, I don’t want to understand what’s happening. I can’t get over how much Sam is doing.” —Derek McCormack
“Sam Max has written an exquisite and powerfully disturbing play in which growing up is no more an option than the incest taboo. Double Serpent takes the repetition compulsion to the nth power, in a slurred Escher maze where fantasy anticipates damage, or did I dream that, or did you say it first? A delicious shudder, for babies and former/future babies.” —Kay Gabriel
“Double Serpent vivisects the haunted covenant of survival within a life-liquidating economy of violence, and insists on the exacting need for connection that persists, even in the wake of the unbearable.” —Early Shinada
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Cover design by John Patrikas
