cover photo by Clare Park
RICHARD NELSON: PLAYS 1
This collection includes five full-length plays:
SOME AMERICANS
ABROAD
TWO
SHAKESPEAREAN ACTORS
NEW ENGLAND
PRINCIPIA
SCRIPTORIAE
LEFT
SOME AMERICANS ABROAD
"...fond
memories of being a culturally high-minded American abroad are Inevitably
revived by SOME AMERICANS ABROAD, Richard Nelson's very funny comedy about
Yankee tourists on an obsessive-compulsive playgoing tour of England....
It's
Mr. Nelson's despairing point that these tourists, college professors and
students on a tight budget, don't remember the content of the plays either. They
are culture vultures who devour everything and digest nothing....
Mr. Nelson's play is a sequel
to THE INNOCENTS ABROAD, Mark Twain's caustic view of pretentious Americans
abroad in the last century: both works indict the well-educated American middle
class for its supine and superficial relationship to Old World culture in
general. Mr. Nelson's characters are particularly marked by a late-20th-century
affliction, the `Masterpiece Theater' syndrome: they find it easier to worship
all things British than to investigate the intellectual life of their own
immediate surroundings...."
Frank Rich, The New York Times
"Richard Nelson's SOME
AMERICANS ABROAD remains a felicitous comedy about the American penchant for all
things English. Mr. Nelson is scathing in his satire, mocking arrogant
intellectuals as well as pence-pinching tourists (same people).... ...the wit
and mordancy of Mr. Nelson's observations...."
Mel Gussow, The New York Times
"...a witty and erudite play
that emphasizes the ironic contrast between cultural snobbishness and amoral
behavior...."
Humm., Variety
"...Richard Nelson's scabrous
comedy..."
Jan Stuart, 7 Days
TWO SHAKESPEARIAN ACTORS
"Richard Nelson's provocative
account of the deadly rivalry between two great 18th century actors, one
quintessentially American, the other quintessentially British.
A writer obsessed with American
vs. English notions of society and class, Nelson spins out a fantasy in comic
but almost documentary detail, from the events that led to New York's Astor
Place riots in May 1849. Competing productions of MACBETH with American
heartthrob Edwin Forrest and British star William Macready drove an America
First mob to break up Macready's performance....
It all adds up to a rare event
for Broadway, a big, populated show in which life, art and melodrama happily
co-exist."
Jeremy Gerard, Variety
"Richard Nelson, who wrote TWO SHAKESPEAREAN ACTORS, is one of our most--forgive the weasel word--interesting playwrights. Having lived both in America and in England, he has acquired a sort of mid-Atlantic accent in his writing. This equips him with both dryly English quips and juicy American humor. ...his plays...show a concern for the world that few American plays do...."
John Simon, New York
NEW ENGLAND
"...with
NEW ENGLAND, Richard Nelson has finally done it--he's written the smart, sharp,
acridly funny play that the RSC's favorite American playwright has been skirting
for ages.
The conceit of the play is typical Nelson--one culture displaced to
another--but its emotional weight is not. There's a new-found urgency and
pathos, allowing us to feel for characters whose own acute perceptions are at
once their downfall and their salvation.
The setting is the Connecticut farmhouse of Englishman Harry Baker,
an academic whose suicide in the opening scene draws together a family scattered
across the States...
Has an American dramatist ever written an English houseful so
deftly?
Not in my experience. In the sweetest of ironies for this of all
writers, it's an American at the peak of his form who has given London's big
subsidized companies the major new play that has eluded them all year."
Matt Wolf, Variety
PRINCIPIA SCRIPTORIAE
"...PRINCIPIA SCRIPTORIAE, a
powerful and intelligent new play by the American Richard Nelson, which explores
the brutal and bloodied relationships between politics and art, and between
literature and life in a Latin American country 15 years ago and today...."
Michael Ratcliffe, The
Sunday Observer
"Modern American plays rarely
confront public issues head-on: Indeed, after a year in New York, a colleague
came home muttering darkly about the prevalence of what he termed
`diaper-drama'. But Richard Nelson's rich and stimulating PRINCIPIA SCRIPTORIAE--now
at The Pit (The Royal Shakespeare Company) after playing at the Manhattan
Theater Club this April--is a genuine play of ideas. It deals with the fate of
the writer under left- and right-wing regimes, with the complex motivation
behind creation, and indeed with the abiding consolation of literature
itself...."
Michael Billington, The Guardian
LEFT
In a weekend lakeside cabin three elderly representatives of the American intellectual left, friends and colleagues in the thirties, try to resolve in the eighties the personal, sexual, and ideological tensions that have come to bedevil their relationships. This is described in scenes counterpointed with others which take place in the same cabin fifty years earlier.
In this deftly constructed and poignantly ironic play, Richard Nelson explores with clear-eyed compassion what time does to people and the causes (and the other people) they have espoused.
Published by Faber and Faber
ISBN: 0-571-19708-6, $19.95