Des Moines

In association with Elizabeth Cuthrell, David Urrutia, and Evenstar Films

New York Premiere

Des Moines
By Denis Johnson
Directed by Arin Arbus
December 10, 2022 – January 8, 2023

Running time: 1 hour and 40 minutes, no intermission

In a seedy apartment on the edge of Des Moines, an unlikely assortment of people come together for an impromptu party that takes them, by the evening’s end, on a dam bursting ride down a stream-of-consciousness deluge. Downing depth chargers and singing karaoke, they struggle with the strange and unholy trinity of life, death, and sex in this work filled with dark humor and mystery. “What I write about,” Johnson observed, “Is the dilemma of living in a fallen world and asking why it is like this if there’s supposed to be a God.”

Michiko Kakutani in her 2017 Appraisal of Denis Johnson in The New York Times observed, “He used his startling gift for language to create word pictures as detailed and visionary, and as varied, as paintings by Edward Hopper and Hieronymus Bosch, capturing the lives of outsiders — the lost, the dispossessed, the damned — with empathy and unsparing candor…There is a fierce, ecstatic quality to Mr. Johnson’s strongest work that lends his characters and their stories an epic, almost mythic dimension, in the best American tradition of Melville and Whitman.”

Please click here to view the 360° Viewfinder for Des Moines.

Denis Johnson (Playwright) is the author of nine novels, three books of verse, two short story collections, a novella, and seven plays. He received many awards and honors, including The National Book Award for Fiction (Tree of Smoke), the Library of Congress Award for American Fiction, and the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review. In 2014, Denis Johnson was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Two of his works were adapted into a film: his book of short stories, Jesus’ Son, starring Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton, and most recently Stars at Noon, directed by Claire Denis. His plays have been produced in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle.

Arin Arbus (Director) is the Resident Director at TFANA, where she most recently directed the critically acclaimed The Merchant of Venice starring John Douglas Thompson. On Broadway, she directed Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (Tony nom for best revival) starring Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon.