A Brief List of Everyone Who Died

Death is the most natural thing in the world.

Natural doesn’t mean good. Hurricanes are natural. Haemorrhoids are natural.

Graciela would really like everyone to stop dying. After the scarring loss of her beloved dog Buster at the age of five, Graciela decides that no one she loves will ever die. But stopping death is easier said than done. Time rolls on inescapably and, as she grows, Graciela will, like everyone else, gain and lose the people most important to her to the eternal absence of mortality.

Wickedly funny and deeply humane, Jacob Marx Rice’s A Brief List of Everyone Who Died tells the story of all the deaths that make up a life.

An online rehearsed reading of A Brief List of Everyone Who Died was shown by the Finborough Theatre in 2021 and was a finalist for the OffWestEnd Awards OnComm Award. This edition is published to coincide with the world premiere at London’s Finborough Theatre in May 2023.

Jacob Marx Rice is a playwright and screenwriter based in Queens, New York. Jacob’s plays have been produced and developed at Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The New Ohio, The Flea Theater, Atlantic Theatre Stage 2, and others. He has won the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Faculty Award from the NYU/Tisch Department of Dramatic Writing and a Sloan Foundation Screenwriting Grant. Jacob was the 2017 Playwright Observer at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. He also wrote the screenplay for See Through, a short film about a Deaf couple featuring Tony-nominated actor Lauren Ridloff (The Sound of Metal, Marvel’s Eternals), which has been featured at the Austin Film Festival, the Cannes’ Festival’s Short Film Corner, and film festivals across the United States.