Books by Sam Marks

3 m / Drama / Interior Nelson is the story of a young man caught between two worlds. By day, he works as a low-level assistant to a film talent agent. By night, Nelson is the camera man for an underground, gang-related videotape series. As the videos become increasingly dangerous and popular, Nelson develops an overwhelming obsession with a C-List actress. Eventually, Nelson's two worlds collide with disturbing, unsettling results. The play is a darkly comic look at the guilt dream of a man trying to find something authentic in a world of two very different kinds of film. "A funny-creepy play by Sam Marks" - Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times "Marks continues to offer a fresh urban voice. Nelson grabs your ear from the outset with its halting staccato street talk, and in the fine office scenes, Nelson's racist boss attacks him with a Mamet-like patter of disdaining sarcasm." - Time Out New York

2m / Dramatic Comedy / Unit set It's 1965 and two comedians, "Steady Eddie" & "Doug the Mug," knock 'em dead every night in the Catskills. Punchlines and cheap shots fly -- on stage and off -- as Doug and Ed battle for the spotlight over a decade, pushing each other to the cusp of a new direction of stand up comedy. With their personal and professional lives uncovered at center stage, Eddie and Doug must find a way to laugh it off while staying at the top of their game. Sam Marks' The Joke takes a look at the friendship and the rivalry between two comic partners during the golden years of the Borscht Belt. "A tasty two-hander by Sam Marks...A comedy team working the Catskills in the 1960s and '70s, getting few laughs while undergoing all the stresses of a doomed marriage...And just as in a marriage in which one half of the couple changes while the other stays the same, the relationship deteriorates. Allusions to a woman and to the historical context as the '60s give way to the '70s are tantalizing but not overdone; the focus stays on the two men.". - Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times