As a gay Lebanese-American Maronite Christian in rural Pennsylvania, Joseph Douaihy has a pretty complicated life. But when his father dies as the result of a prank, things truly take a turn for the bizarre.
Stephen Karam's play Sons of the Prophet confronts, with intelligence, empathy and tenderness, the inevitability of loss and the equally inevitable comedy which results from our attempts to cope with its consequences.
It premiered in Boston in April 2011, transferred Off-Broadway later that year, won the Lucille Lortel, New York Drama Critics' Circle and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best Play, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It received its European premiere at Hampstead Theatre, London, in 2022, directed by Bijan Sheibani.
"Ravishing" is the best word for Stephen Karam's new comedy. At once deep, deft and beautifully made, Sons of the Prophet stares unflinchingly at the Gorgon's head of grief – the kind of grief on which words have no purchase, the indigestible pain that never really goes away… Some things are lost; some are found; some are gone forever. Sons of the Prophet ponders this hard truth; it makes us consider the unacceptable' - John Lahr - New Yorker
'Devastating and thrilling… by turns grave, poetic, wrenching, wry and madcap, Sons of the Prophet... defies easy categorization. And it confirms [Karam]… as a major voice in American theater' - Vogue
'To observe that a play about extreme suffering is also explosively funny might seem absurd. But one of the many soul-piercing truths in Sons of the Prophet, the absolutely wonderful new comedy-drama by Stephen Karam, is that life rarely obeys the rules of dramatic consistency, or, for that matter, fair play… And with unerring sensitivity he finds the sweet spot at which laughing at the horrors of life and feeling compassion for those who must endure them intersect' - Charles Isherwood - New York Times