the last supper | nyc 2002

"Ed Schmidt is a fairly ordinary-looking middle-aged white guy with thinning hair, a little bit of a gut, and a lot of funny melancholy. He performs his work in his perfectly nice Carroll Gardens flat for an audience of fourteen - the maximum number of seats he has to offer. In 2002, for his play "The Last Supper," Schmidt invited viewers to the Park Slope house where he was then living, to watch him make dinner as he talked about faith and the players at Jesus' table during his final meal. Now, with "My Last Play," Schmidt is performing-- well, his last play. In it, he talks about his life on the margins of the American theatre, and then he invites each audience member to choose a theatre book to take from his library of two thousand; the play will run until there are no books left."

New Yorker, March 14 2011

"Read Hilton Als's positive Critic's Notebook, in the current issue of The New Yorker, which was based only on other critics' articles and reviews, since Hilton Als has neither seen nor read any of my plays nor met me. (Otherwise he wouldn't have said that I have a gut, right? Because I don't. I mean, look at the picture below. It might look like I have a gut, because of the angle and the untucked t-shirt and my weird posture and the fact that the photo was taken by my 11-year-old daughter, but I don't have a gut. But now everyone who reads The New Yorker thinks that I do. And that's not an insignificant number of people. Which kind of sucks.)"

edschmidt.info

"The title has a double meaning. Ostensibly, the play—which is performed and directed by Schmidt—is a retelling of the original last supper, focusing of the women who prepared the meal for Jesus and his disciples. But Schmidt often gets off track, sometimes talking about his own frustrated ambitions as a playwright, reading from copious rejection letters. Meanwhile, the author is busy fixing of four course dinner, meant to be consumed by the audience at the end of the performance."

Playbill, March 2004