The Law of Remains

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:

    The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
    Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)

    What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart,
    Of thee what word remains ere speech be still?
    A wayfarer by barren ways and chill,
    Steep ways and weary, without her thou art,
    Where the long cloud, the long wood’s counterpart,
    Sheds doubled darkness up the labouring hill.
    Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)