cover photo by Peter Cunningham
this collection contains three full-length plays and a monologue:
CONJURING AN EVENT
JUNGLE COUP
THE KILLING OF YABLONSKI
SCOOPING
From the introduction by Robert Marx, Executive Director of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts:
"Richard Nelson has gifts to spare. His
talent, skill, wisdom, persistence and faith in the power of
theater have led to an unprecedented American career. Irony,
which infuses his writing, has come to inform his life. He is one
of the most-produced American writers in Europe and England
(particularly by the Royal Shakespeare Company), but Nelson's
plays have enjoyed few major productions in the U S A. He writes
passionately about his country's politics and morals, but his
prime audiences are foreign. Nelson is able to create plays built
upon venomous characters and brutal scenes, but is himself
generously loyal to family and colleagues. On stage and in life,
there is no one quite like him.....
This three-volume collection of Richard's early
plays provides a welcome chance to revisit his exciting young
work and the struggles of a writer's career....
The four plays in this first volume (THE
KILLING OF YABLONSKI, CONJURING AN EVENT, JUNGLE COUP and the
short monologue SCOOPING) were written between 1975 and 1977. An
indication of the excitement sparked by Richard Nelson, whose
plays first surfaced in informal workshops at the Mark Taper
Forum in Los Angeles, is that the three full-length works
included here were all produced by major not-for-profit New York
theaters in back-to-back presentations between February and June
1978. It was a critical trial-by-fire, and a painful time for
him, but these darkly comic plays have themes, character traits
and theatrical set-ups that Nelson would refine in his acclaimed
later work. The Chekhovian spirit that informs Nelson's mature
plays is not yet evident, but many of the basic tenets of his
writing are already in place.
From the start, Richard has been something of
an American contrarian. In common with O'Neill, he often explores
the dark side of American myth and bravado. The mid-1970s was the
Post-Watergate era. Counter-culture investigative journalism
brought down the Nixon White House, and reporters replaced rock
stars as gods for the young. These four reporter plays aimed to
burst the bubble of admiration that surrounded American
journalism at that time."
PLAYS BY RICHARD NELSON, EARLY PLAYS VOLUME ONE
I S B N: 0-88145-150-9, $16.95