Author Description

A brilliantly conceived and highly theatrical experience in absurdist drama, in which the audience is taken on a wild and funny metaphysical journey into the fertile imaginations of the diverse characters whose bizarre stories are deftly interwoven into the fabric of the play. DARK RIDE is comprised of a series of vignettes involving characters who, at first, appear to bear no relation to each other. A mysterious figure gives a scholar an ancient manuscript to translate; a thief steals an enormous jewel; a woman assures us that life is all coincidence; a dream-like waitress serves her customers all manner of thoughts and suggestions but no food. The images are bizarrely funny and provocative and, in time, coalesce into a pattern of driving concerns and obsessions that come into focus when the various characters finally meet at an oculists convention in Mexico City. Phantasmagoric, the play takes us on a journey that, in the final essence, transcends the physical world to explore the inner recesses of the mind. "The trip itself, like a spooky show in a carnival tunnel, is full of bright, surprising images, scary and funny." -The Village Voice "... funny, rich, erudite, playful, assured." -Soho News "Few playwrights have Jenkin's skill at theatrical sleight-of-hand ... it supplies an ingenuity which cannot fail to stimulate both the theatre and the theatregoer." -The New York Daily News