Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven

by Stephen Adly Guirgis

“Guirgis, a lifelong New Yorker and a properly profane bard of the city, is a wizard at getting language to flow hot, funny, and fast…Guirgis’s rough-cut gem of a play is rich with revelation and barbed empathy.” —Alexandra Schwartz,  New Yorker Stephen Adly Guirgis brings his prodigious gifts for exploring the lives of social outcasts to new heights in this play about the inner workings of a women’s halfway house in New York City, where the unmoored residents struggle with addiction, abuse, and mental illness. Between daily therapy sessions, they clash with the staff and each other, form alliances, and fall in love. Harrowing, humorous, and heartbreaking,  Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven  roaringly brings to life the experiences of women who society has tried to shuffle out of sight and out of mind.

Genres: Plays

120 pages, Paperback

Published December 6, 2022

About the author

Stephen Adly Guirgis is an American playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor. He is a member and a former co-artistic director of New York City's LAByrinth Theater Company. His plays have been produced both Off-Broadway and on Broadway, as well as in the UK. His play Between Riverside and Crazy won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Reviews

[Theo Logos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nobody does urban tragedy quite like Stephen Adly Guirgis. His tragedies abound with ex cons, junkies, hookers, criminals, drunks, the sexually and socially marginalized — a who’s who of wasted lives and broken dreams, of fragile folk rejected and forgotten by mainstream America. He tells their stories with sympathy and startling humor, pulling no punches. He doesn’t resort to dishonest happy endings, but rather gives his characters the dignity of honestly presenting their lives as lived.

Halfway Bitches Go Straight To Heaven tells its story in a halfway house for battered and endangered women. It’s a facility that is hopelessly underfunded, and endangered from the resentment of its neighbors. Guirgis stocked it with an ensemble cast of the broken and the damned, and the mad collisions of their various storylines create the frenetic, profane, sometimes hilarious, but always scrupulously humane tragedy that has come to identify his plays.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5, rounded down.

Guirgis tends to run hot and cold for me - I loved some of his early works, but then didn't care at all for his 2015 Pulitzer winner Between Riverside and Crazy. He came back in 2019 with this sprawling work though, which took some time for me (and the NYT critic!) to warm up to - it's a brutal, somewhat dehumanizing look at the denizens of a halfway house, and to call them the dregs of society would be charitable. The usual culprits are all on tap: alcohol and drug addiction, prostitution, abusive relationships, mental illness, PTSD, various disabilities, sexual 'deviations', etc. - but the specificity with which the playwright endows each character is phenomenal - especially since there are 20 characters to keep track of over nearly 3 hours. It's a lot to take in, and not all of the scenes come to satisfying conclusions (but that's life, no?), but the effort is ultimately rewarded with a really fine play.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/th...
https://www.playbill.com/article/a-lo...
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lif...
https://www.timeout.com/newyork/theat...

[Isabella · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was good, really raw, filled with emotion that hits you in the face

[JD · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fucking saddest ending to a play I've read in awhile. There's no hope here.
This is the 3rd play I've read of...Stephen's, and I always love how real his characters are. Fucking raunchy and gritty. dirty and imperfect. All the characters has their own voice and has different levels of agency. I wish there was more Bella before she leaves, but oh well. Also the ending being a whole thing about how no one cares about veterans was fucking WILD. The ending is ROUGH.
The goat shit felt a bit undercooked. The Fatger Miguel subplot also felt rushed. I absolutely love his conversation with Joey about doing the right thing. But, did this man kill Nicky behind the building and NO ONE discovered his body?? Unless I read that wrong, that shit us fucking funny.
This play is fast paced and fuckin not scared to get real with how characters berate and jab at each other. Definitely something I'd recommend!


Wake-Up San Francisco!

[jane bro · Rating 4 out of 5]

i haven’t finished a book all the way through in a couple months, a lot of it has to do with being in rhythms of writing and working and a lack of an attention span. BUT i’m working towards getting back in rhythm. and THIS was a fantastic play to sit through, funny, heartbreaking, and some of the best ensemble character work i’ve seen recently, i definitely recommend picking this up because it’s a very important play. this is the second play i picked up by Stephen (the first was the Judas one). the two I have read are not his most recognized plays, and i loved them, can’t wait to dive deeper into his work.

[Bobby Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every last character (well, okay, maybe not the cops at the end) is messed up in this play. Quite a lot of built-in drama, since it's set in an urban shelter for women. The dialogue rings true, but don't look for any happy endings in this one.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

The final scene showing how little elected officials and staffers care for those most impacted by their decisions was a gut-wrenching reality check. This play has a lot of heart.

[Alonzo Rangel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guirgis never disappoints. Funny, tragic, restless, pitch-perfect dialogue.

[Jess Foley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, timely, truthful. Necessary read.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

ouch. stephen adly guirgis sure knows how to gut you right there at the end. right there under the streetlight