Double Serpent
May 2026
Double Serpent
$20.00
In stock
"Double Serpent is a disquieting fever dream from one of America’s freshest theatrical minds that will haunt you for days after you encounter it."
— Jordan Tannahill
About the Book
In a penthouse in Manhattan, Connor plays dead for his wealthy older boyfriend Felix. Elsewhere, in a dark, wet basement in 1999, he plays Double Serpent with his invisible friend while he waits for Fake Dad to be done with his business upstairs.
Using a brilliant triple-helix structure, Sam Max’s playscript threads fantasy together with Connor’s past and present, creating a thriller in which there are Fake Dads and real daddies, surgery and blood play, childhood scarring and adulthood dissociation. In Double Serpent, sex and intimacy both redeem and reinflict.
An interview between Sam Max and Derek McCormack accompanies the playscript.
Author
Sam Max
(b. 1995) is an American film director, screenwriter, stage director, and playwright, working in New York City and Berlin. His most recent play, Double Serpent, was nominated for Vienna’s prestigious Nestroy Prize for Best Performance in the German-Speaking World, and was selected for the 2025 Theatertreffen at Berliner Festspiele, as one of the 10 Most Remarkable Productions in Germany. He is the author of three additional stage plays: Pidor and the Wolf (Chesley-Bumbalo Award, Lotos Prize, Honorable Mention: Relentless Award), Coop (Theatertreffen-Stückemarkt, ETA Hoffmann Theater Bamberg), and The Holes (Deutsches Theater Berlin). His plays perform internationally in the repertoire of various theaters, and have been translated into German, Mandarin, and Greek. He is currently an ongoing Guest Director of Deutsches Theater Berlin, and a playwright member of New Dramatists in New York. In film, Sam’s debut short film Chaperone held its World Premiere at Sundance and has played over three-dozen festivals internationally. It received numerous festival awards including a Special Mention for Best U.S. Short (Palm Springs), Special Mention for Best Short (Turin), The Horizon Award for Most Promising Filmmaker (24fps), and the shortlist for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. Sam has been named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” and he sits on the Board of film distributor Video Store.Age. He resides in New York City.
Praise
"
Double Serpent effortlessly inhabits a dramaturgy of trauma, finding and distilling the rhythm of repressed and (re)lapsing memory. Characters morph together through shared textures, and pain is strung together through associative patterning. Max asks the audience to consider the difference between projection, experience, memory and imagination, examining how we play out our deepest shame in every present moment. Max’s skill shines through the technicolor violence, buoyant dialogue, and taut tension, haunting audiences far beyond the end of the play."
— Nazareth Hassan
"Sam Max doesn’t have time for respectability politics, he’s busy making theatre for all of us spiritually broken perverts.
Double Serpent is a disquieting fever dream from one of America’s freshest theatrical minds that will haunt you for days after you encounter it."
— Jordan Tannahill
"Wriggly, complicated, dense, beautiful, and so tight. I’ve read it so many times, and every time I get flashes of understanding, I reject them. I don't want to understand it fully, I don't want to understand what's happening. I can’t get over how much Sam is doing."
— Derek McCormack
"Sam Max has written an exquisite and powerfully disturbing play in which growing up is no more an option than the incest taboo.
Double Serpent takes the repetition compulsion to the nth power, in a slurred Escher maze where fantasy anticipates damage, or did I dream that, or did you say it first? A delicious shudder, for babies and former/future babies."
— Kay Gabriel
“There is a world of boys that’s all snakes, no ladders.
Double Serpent takes me down through the basement, where it’s cold and wet and scary, but I like it. Right down into the wound, where the forward arrow on the temporality switch seems broken. Where any door could open up to heaven, but instead opens me into a more unnerving tenderness. Where psychosis-induced-psychic-connections anchor into an innocence defined by perversion. Never has choking on my own tail tasted so good.”
— Bobbi Menuez
"
Double Serpent is a rare dramatic work that ties the groans of the queer subconscious to the temporality of queer bodies in space, in time, and in pain. Sam Max bends feelings around facts with a shadowy fearlessness.
Double Serpent, like Sarah Kane's
4.48 Psychosis or Heiner Müller's
Hamletmachine, is an invitation for theatermakers to represent the unrepresentable."
— Hari Nef
“
Double Serpent vivisects the haunted covenant of survival within a life-liquidating economy of violence, and insists on the exacting need for connection that persists, even in the wake of the unbearable.”
— Early Shinada
Details
ISBN: 978-1-946604-52-1
Publication Date: May 1, 2026
