Event

The Internationalist

Lowell, an American on a business trip, is met at the airport by a beautiful colleague. They spend the night together and he thinks he's in one of those great American movies where you go to a foreign land and there's romance and adventure and the experience changes you. The next day at the office he discovers that he's not in one of those movies, he's in one of those foreign films where nothing is as it seems, where there is no moral, and most importantly: no subtitles.

The play dissects the experience of being an American abroad in a post 9/11 world, and the peculiar mix of pride and embarrassment with which liberal Americans regard their nationality. The Washington Post review of the play described it as exploring "Americans' sense of cultural superiority, and how quickly arrogance melts away when one is forced to play by the rules of an ever more confident rest-of-the-world."