Disaster Capitalism; Or Money Can't Buy You Love Three Plays by Rick Mitchell

'Disaster capitalism' is an increasingly popular critical paradigm for contextualizing and understanding life in the twenty-first century, as people throughout the world grapple with the consequences of 'disaster' in the form of unprecedented terrorism, hurricanes and earthquakes, global warming, war, polluted environments, and forced immigration. Rick Mitchell, an award-winning dramatist who has been called 'a modern day Brecht', is the rare U.S. playwright who engages with pressing political trends through a bold and original theatricality that is often as humorous as it is poignant and prescient. The book includes three full-length plays: "Shadow Anthropology" (a dark comedy about the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan), "Through the Roof" (a Faustian trip through the social history of 'natural' disaster in New Orleans), and "Celestial Flesh" (a sacrilegious romp through the 1980s sanctuary movement, sacred sex, and CIA drug running in a Los Angeles Catholic Church). Placing the plays within an historical and thematic context, the author introduces the collection with an essay examining catastrophe, capitalism, and what he calls 'Apocalypse Theatre for the Twenty-First Century'.