cover photo by Peter Cunningham
this collection contains three full-length plays:
BAL
THE RETURN OF PINOCCHIO
THE VIENNA NOTES
From the introduction by Robert Marx, Executive Director of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts:
“Conversations with Richard Nelson lead
inevitably to two topics: theater and politics. Nelson's anger
and occasional pleasure in the political fortunes of his country
are deeply felt. Discourse is essential to his insight, and the
news of the day can obsess him. He is not without hope, but sees
the gap between America's lofty goals and its day-to-day reality
as an unacceptable burden of citizenship. America's successes are
self-evident to him. Our national failures are what he chooses to
confront through the shattered myths, ironic humor and violent
imagery of his political plays. Believing that theater and civic
argument are not mutually exclusive, he will sacrifice audience
ease to confrontational issues: Nelson's political plays can be
willfully disturbing events on stage.
This volume contains three of Richard Nelson's
earliest political dramas. Like the works in Volume One of this
series, these plays chart the evolution of Nelson's prolific
career as well as his evolution as a major American playwright.
THE VIENNA NOTES was first produced Off-Broadway in 1979.
Although well-received, it was the fourth Richard Nelson play to
be staged in New York in a single year. Its production marked the
end of Nelson's presence as a young writer in that city. His next
phase of work took place in the inevitably nomadic world of
American regional theater. BAL (following CONJURING AN EVENT) was
first staged in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1979, and in
Chicago in 1980. THE RETURN OF PINOCCHIO had a 1982 workshop at
San Francisco's Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and a full
production at Seattle's Empty Space in 1983....
The political plays of those years mark
Nelson's intense response to America's evolution from its
left-leaning Post-Watergate era to the 1980 election of Ronald
Reagan and the country's turn to the right. Outrage is the tone
of voice that unifies much of his work from this period. Taken
together, these three plays present a downward moral trajectory.
THE VIENNA NOTES shows a politician who literally lives by
acting, almost in opposition to reality. BAL (loosely based upon
Brecht's first play) presents a defiantly evil character whose
immoral rampage has political overtones. The sequence ends with
THE RETURN OF PINOCCHIO, in which the familiar Italian folk tale
becomes a dangerous Reaganite nightmare.
All three plays present victims without redemption—manipulative
`players' who are blind to reality and mired in egotism. Nelson warns us about
personal and political indulgence, and the threat of greed and selfishness when
pitched as a defining social standard.”
PLAYS BY RICHARD NELSON, EARLY PLAYS VOLUME TWO
I S B N 0-88145-151-7: $16.95