In these three plays (Exact Change, Hair of the Dog, and Shades), dramatist and screenwriter David Epstein brilliantly sketches the bleak, despairing-and howlingly funny-underside of contemporary American life.

"I haven't laughed so much in a theater all year. With Epstein's blackish sense of humor and wry relish of the odd, his play fizzes with talent."-Benedict Nightingale, The Times of London

"You begin by watching unexplained actions; and when exposition arrives it propels the action through the roof. . . . By this time, Exact Change has also parted company with Mamet and revealed itself as more than an efficient laughter-machine. Nothing halts the present-tense narrative; but, from throwaway lines, you begin to assemble detail about the past . . . One sign of this writer's quality is that he can bring the piece to such an ending without jumping the comic rails: chilling but still brilliant."-Irving Wardle, The Independent on Sunday