My Uncle Sam

Uncle Sam was a novelties salesman who died one night, alone and broke, in a Pittsburgh hotel. But he was also a larger-than-life figure, a mythic hero, to his nephew - who now seeks to discover his uncle's true story. His quest is a quixotic and picaresque one, involving a seductive nightclub singer who promises to marry Sam if he can locate his ne'er-do-well brother (who absconded with the proceeds from a robbery), and developing into a series of sometimes funny, sometimes hair-raising episodes as the nephew "becomes" his uncle in his youth and journeys to a remote lighthouse, a rather sinister university laboratory, an opium den, the clinic of a Mexican quack, and a very odd miniature golf course - all intriguingly distorted, as though viewed through a funhouse mirror. In the end it is really the landscape of the mind that is explored and illuminated, as the trail leads back to Old Sam and the disquieting knowledge that dreams and reality are, in the final essence, often one and the same, with the "truth" still remaining tantalizingly out of reach. "Mr. Jenkin's play is in the first place a loving but rarified pulp-fiction parody, full of ingenious and peculiar turns of language." -The Village Voice "Jenkin's plays are, in a sense, loony detective stories, a pilgrim's progress through thickets of American hype and ignorance." -The New York Daily News "By the end of this imaginative evening, one could say that the play is a journey of self-discovery, a pop art fairy tale, or an investigation into the American psyche." -BackStage "... it's a wonderful piece, astonishingly imaginative and challenging." -The Bergen Record