Denis Johnson and "The Starlight on Idaho"

For decades, celebrated fiction author Denis Johnson (Jesus’ Son and Tree of Smoke) has been writing some of the most adventurous plays in modern American theater, with a major trilogy focused on the Cassandra family, a clan so star-crossed that several members are incarcerated, institutionalized or in and out of rehab. The epistolary The Starlight on Idaho finds the youngest son, Cass, sobering up in a clinic housed in what was once a hot-sheet motel on Idaho Street, the Starlight. While he’s there, he writes screeds, pleas, and confessions to members of his family, his AA sponsor, his grade school love, and Satan. In this unique adaptation, the addressor and addressee voice the letters together. Literature as only Denis Johnson can create it, The Starlight on Idaho is not quite a story, not quite a play, and it is pure WordTheatre.

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