cover photo by Peter Cunningham
this collection contains three full-length plays:
AN AMERICAN COMEDY
JITTERBUGGING: SCENES OF SEX IN A SOCIETY
RIP VAN WINKLE OR "THE WORKS"
From the introduction by Robert Marx, Executive Director of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts:
"The plays in this volume were written by
Richard Nelson between 1981 and 1983--years in which he struggled
to balance alienation and hope. His productive, but difficult
early career ends with this work. His mature career as an
American playwright of international acclaim would soon begin.
The intersection of politics and morality is central to Richard's
plays. From the start, he has been a socially conscious and
provocative writer whose values were defined largely by the
anti-war and counter-culture experiences of 1960s America. With
the election of the Reagan Administration in 1980, most of us who
saw the world through the political prism of our 1960s youth felt
despondent....
...Like Arthur Miller's THE CRUCIBLE, Nelson used American myth
and history as a potent metaphor against a rapacious contemporary
society. What McCarthyism was to THE CRUCIBLE, Reaganism is to
RIP VAN WINKLE.
The bleak fury of Nelson's BAL and PINOCCHIO is pushed here to
epic ends. Rip becomes an American King Lear, defying the storms
of a new industrial nation....
With AN AMERICAN COMEDY and JITTERBUGGING Nelson moved to gentler
terrain.... AN AMERICAN COMEDY... is an homage to the screwball
American comedies of George Abbott, Hecht & MacArthur and
Kaufman & Hart, with a bit of Italy's Dario Fo brought into
the mix. An outright farce about Broadway playwrights meeting a
deadline, Nelson juggles an absurd mix of American art, politics
and theatrical commerce with more than a little self-parody and
respect for the humor of survival.
Although it was not produced until 1989, JITTERBUGGING was
written in 1983. It is...Schnitzler's LA RONDE, a cynical
turn-of-the-century romance that Nelson reinvented as a rueful
American tale. Set in 1947, this cycle of brief sexual encounters
in a seaside New England town contrasts the sadness of each
manipulative liaison with the surface optimism of period songs.
The World War has burned out; its passions are gone, too. What's
left is a reflection of the play's subtitle: `Scenes of Sex
in a New Society'. Once again, Nelson is not far from the
war of his own youth and its shallow aftermath.
RIP VAN WINKLE is a thundering American epic. AN AMERICAN COMEDY
celebrates loud Broadway farce. But JITTERBUGGING is mostly
tender. It has an interior quality that suggests how ready
Richard was in 1983 for a fresh approach. An opportunity for
change occurred soon afterwards, when Liviu Ciulei commissioned
him to write a new version of THE THREE SISTERS for the Guthrie.
That encounter with Chekhov proved to be a turning point for
Richard's own style and led to the plays that established his
strong reputation in England (BETWEEN EAST AND WEST and PRINCIPIA
SCRIPTORIAE)....
PLAYS BY RICHARD NELSON, EARLY PLAYS VOLUME THREE
I S B N 0-88145-152-5: $16.95