The Law of Remains is a 1991 play by Los Angeles-based Iranian playwright, director and filmmaker Reza Abdoh. The play, initially staged in a New York City hotel, was described in A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama as "an apocalyptic fantasia". In its 1992 review, The New York Times characterized it as "one of the angriest theater pieces ever hurled at a New York audience".
The seven-scene play focuses on violence and its social impacts, through the use of Andy Warhol’s aesthetics, incorporating police reports on the murders of Jeffrey Dahmer in exploring the deeds of fictionalized killer "Jeffrey Snarling". It uses Dahmer's crime, particularly against an adolescent Laotian who almost escaped Dahmer until police presumed the conflict was a dispute between gay lovers, to create a metaphor for "governmental indifference to the AIDS crisis". Anita Durst, an actress and disciple of Abdoh who procured the location, summarized the play as "Andy Warhol and Jeffrey Dahmer meet in Heaven". The play is a non-linear multi-media presentation, adding to traditional dramatic structure a soundtrack of "death, sex and violence" and "raucous" imagery, both live and electronic.
Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts' undergraduate senior theatre thesis group staged a reinterpretation of The Law of Remains in May 2011 at La Mama E.T.C in New York City.
Famous quotes containing the words law and/or remains:
“Law without education is a dead letter. With education the needed law follows without effort and, of course, with power to execute itself; indeed, it seems to execute itself.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The best thing about the sciences is their philosophical ingredient, like life for an organic body. If one dephilosophizes the sciences, what remains left? Earth, air, and water.”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)