Miscast, by Michael Trocchia

Drama, prose, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Miscast gathers three lyrical prose plays that blur the boundaries between theater, poetry, and philosophy. In these surreal and existentially charged works, characters grapple with questions of identity, performance, truth, and the stories people tell about themselves. Whether inhabiting a world where a cellist abandons his art after encountering a mysterious young woman, reflecting on a life spent inhabiting roles that never quite fit, or participating in an absurd audition that unfolds across decades, Trocchia’s characters move across a stage where reality and invention continually exchange masks.

Written in a lyrical prose that mixes wit, melancholy, and wonder, these plays explore what it means to perform a life rather than simply live one. Trocchia draws on theatrical conventions only to dismantle and reimagine them, creating works that, though brief, are at once intimate dramas and meditations on language, artifice, and selfhood. The result is a chapbook that invites readers to consider how we are shaped by the roles we inherit, the fictions we construct, and the elusive parts of life that remain behind the curtain.

Michael Trocchia’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Black Sun Lit, Chicago Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Fourteen Hills, New Orleans Review, Poetry International, Tarpaulin Sky, UCity Review, and elsewhere. He teaches philosophy and works in the library at James Madison University in Virginia.