Mahinerator + The Barbarians
Format:Paperback
Publisher:53rd State Press
Publishing:5th Nov '26
£12.99
This title is due to be published on 5th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
To engage with Lieblich’s plays is to become obsessed with how language works, how it works on us, and how we use it to work on others. —Thinking Theater NYC
In Mahinerator, an ambitious bureaucrat, speaking in a quasi-English pseudolect, tells his greatliest life story; a story of the banalation of the evilwise, of vacuumic compressulated ecocide.
The Barbarians is a loggorheic encyclopedic rambunctious gollywompus of a play concerning speech acts, political power, fractal geometry, eusociality, theater, nonsense, aircraft carriers, cell phone networks, Bifröst, My Heart Will Go On, semiotics, pyramids, and picturesque American normalcy.
A composer of language’s skewed longings, these plays by Jerry Lieblich torque and tickle our grammars, taking these jangly, tangling systems as occasions for probing the political structures through which we participate in our and others’ demise.
Praise for Mahinerator
A hilariously gruesome sci-fi monologue…Revolting yet thrilling—it uses language alone to melt your brain.
—Helen Shaw, The New Yorker
Lieblich’s verbally virtuosic play is an eerily funny, deeply chilling demonstration not simply of the banality of evil, but of its absurdity.
—Sara Holdren, Vulture
Praise for The Barbarians
Bright, acerbically witty and linguistically acrobatic
—The Brooklyn Rail
An unfurling meditation on rhetoric and power (and the power of rhetoric)…Jerry's approach to playwriting and enthusiasm for language can be understood as almost scientific.
—Kate Dakota Kremer, Culturebot
Painfully funny and utterly terrifying…A freewheeling theatrical adventure that careens through multiple timeframes, realities, and spheres.
—David Driver, BOMB Magazine
Countries are made of laws, and laws are made of words. So are plays. How strange. The Barbarians is an imaginative, word-drunk romp through that strangeness, a play about a description of a play about a group of scientists gumming up the linkage between language and political power.
—Thinking Theater NYC
ISBN: 9798989946143
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
168 pages