Lot Six at Playwrights Horizons

Playwrights Horizons will host writer and Playwrights commissionee David Adjmi (Marie Antoinette, Stunning, the upcoming Stereophonic on Broadway) and actress Marin Ireland (Marie Antoinette, Summer and Smoke, Playwrights: Maple and Vine) for a live reading and discussion of Adjmi's acclaimed memoir Lot Six, DECEMBER 10 at 6:30pm EST. Audiences can stream the event free of charge via the theater's Facebook page, and can suggest questions for the conversation, hosted by Adam Greenfield, on its website. Lot Six is published by HarperCollins Publishers and is available now at New York City independent bookseller McNally Jackson and wherever books are sold.

In Lot Six, Adjmi recounts his tumultuous search for identity with the same dazzling skill that has propelled him to dizzying heights in the theater world. Spanning decades, this vibrant chronicle unspools what he calls "a Dickensian story of self-invention inside a complicated framework of friendship and family."

An emotionally adrift outsider in his own home, David's feelings of displacement were intensified by the early realization, while he was growing up in a gossipy, insular Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn in the 1970s and 1980s, that he was a "lot six"-slang for queer. He had been groomed for a conventional life in the electronics business but rebelled against his yeshiva education and upbringing and found a haven-and more-in '80s pop culture. It was then and there that Adjmi, a born storyteller and already a protean character, committed fully to recreating himself.

While sharing his coming of age tale, Adjmi reflects unsparingly on wrestling with his homosexuality, navigating bastions of privilege as an interloper, discovering his talent, and reckoning with his family legacy of dysfunction. At once singular and relatable, this absorbing account is about finding and losing oneself in the mirrors of art and culture when one feels displaced from birth. It is about finding one's voice and learning how to deploy it. And it is about the difficult, occasionally exhilarating process of forging a path as an artist and an individual.