Shipwrecked! (The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (as told by himself))

Hush now! For I am about to tell you a story.
A fantastic and amazing story!
A story all the more remarkable because every word of it is true. That’s right. Every word.
How do I know?
Because I lived it, dear ones…

Thus begins Shipwrecked! An Entertainment—The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (As Told by Himself). Based on a Victorian hoaxer’s tale of being a castaway in the South Pacific—complete with buried treasure, a giant killer octopus, and cannibals—Margulies revisits themes of authenticity and loss as he returns to what theater does best.


Reviews:
“A deft literate narrative folded into a vaudevillian romp.” –Los Angeles Times

“Re-creating the pleasures of nineteenth-centure platform entertainment with a tart contemporary twist, Shipwrecked! offers a self-promoting fabulist a forum to inform and persuade, and it delights in both respects…The emotional through line transforms a ripping good yarn into a touching character study.” -Variety

“An intriguing step beyond Margulies’s typically naturalistic work…Margulies’s script is a tribute to the power of storytelling, in particular to the telling of tall tales we are asked to believe despite any wildly unlikely events.” –Cincinnati City Beat

“This whirlwind escapade of the imagination takes the audience out of what they might expect from theater and into a new, uncharted realm of whimsy and adventure…Quirky and wondrous, Shipwrecked! is truly an odyssey of the imagination.” –Montgomery News


Donald Margulies received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dinner with Friends. The play received numerous awards, including the American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, the Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award and a Drama Desk nomination, and has been produced all over the United States and around the world. In addition to his adaptation of God of Vengeance, his many plays include Collected Stories, The Country House, Sight Unseen, The Model Apartment, The Loman Family Picnic, What’s Wrong with This Picture? and Time Stands Still. Mr. Margulies currently lives with his wife and their son in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at Yale University.