Mahinerator + The Barbarians
$28.04
- Paperback
168 pages
- Release Date
5 November 2026
Summary
To engage with Lieblich’s plays is to become obsessed with how language works, how it works on us, and how we use it to work on others. -Thinking Theater NYC
In Mahinerator, an ambitious bureaucrat, speaking in a quasi-English pseudolect, tells his greatest life story; a story of the banality of the evilwise, of vacuumic compressulated ecocide.
The Barbarians is a loggorheic encyclopedic rambunctious gollywompus of a play concerning speech acts, political power, …
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9798989946143 |
|---|---|
| Author: | Jerry Lieblich |
| Publisher: | 53rd State Press |
| Imprint: | 53rd State Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 168 |
| Release Date: | 5 November 2026 |
| Dimensions: | 177mm x 127mm |
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What They're Saying
Critics Review
Praise for Mahinerator
A hilariously gruesome sci-fi monologue…Revolting yet thrilling—it uses language alone to melt your brain.
—Helen Shaw, The New Yorker
Lieblich’s verbally virtuosic play is an eerily funny, deeply chilling demonstration not simply of the banality of evil, but of its absurdity.
—Sara Holdren, Vulture
Praise for The Barbarians
Bright, acerbically witty and linguistically acrobatic
—The Brooklyn Rail
An unfurling meditation on rhetoric and power (and the power of rhetoric)…Jerry’s approach to playwriting and enthusiasm for language can be understood as almost scientific.
—Kate Dakota Kremer, Culturebot
Painfully funny and utterly terrifying…A freewheeling theatrical adventure that careens through multiple timeframes, realities, and spheres.
—David Driver, BOMB Magazine
Countries are made of laws, and laws are made of words. So are plays. How strange. The Barbarians is an imaginative, word-drunk romp through that strangeness, a play about a description of a play about a group of scientists gumming up the linkage between language and political power.
—Thinking Theater NYC
About The Author
Jerry Lieblich
Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands between theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Their plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La MaMa), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Clubbed Thumb-Critic’s Pick: NY Times, TimeOut NY (Cloud City-Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, NACL, SPACE on Ryder Farm, and UCROSS, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and Yiddishkayt. They have received an EST/Sloan Commission, the Himan Brown Creative Writing Award (twice), and a Martha Boschen Porter Fund grant from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. They are an alum of the Soho Rep. Writer/Director Lab, Page 73’s I-73 Writer’s Group, and Pipeline Theater’s Playlab group. BA: Yale, Philosophy; MFA: Brooklyn College (Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney, chief instigators).
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