cover photo by Richard Anderson
ERIC OVERMYER
COLLECTED PLAYS
NATIVE SPEECH
IN A PIG'S VALISE
IN PERPETUITY THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE
THE HELIOTROPE BOUQUET BY SCOTT JOPLIN AND LOUIS CHAUVIN
DARK RAPTURE
"Eric Overmyer [is] one of this nation's most accomplished and vividly imaginative playwrights."
Wayne Johnson, The Seattle Times
"In NATIVE SPEECH, ON THE VERGE and IN PERPETUITY THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE, Eric Overmyer manifested a extraordinary command over the tools of language: sound, syntax and image.... In DARK RAPTURE, which premiered at Seattle's Empty Space Theater in May, Overmyer's verbal dexterity is acute as ever, but this time it's harnessed to a plot delivered by characters who seem driven by purposes of their own. It's by far Overmyer's most satisfying play.
DARK RAPTURE may not, however, earn its author the critical praise it deserves--it certainly didn't in Seattle--because it adheres so strictly to the rules of the genre. In the written arts, in film, in dance, in pop music, a creative artist's submission to such rules earns no disrespect. In theater, it seems we honor work created within rigid conventions only if the conventions are someone else's: kabuki or kathakali, wayang or noh.
DARK RAPTURE is `noir,' the genre which crystallized in the 1940s novels and screenplays of Raymond Chandler and has intermittently borne fruit ever since in the hands of artists as various as Richard Condon and Wim Wenders. Good noir is rare on stage.... But his DARK RAPTURE is the most successful stage essay in the form since Len Jenkins's marvelous, poetic FIVE OF US.
Like many noir fictions, DARK RAPTURE is about escape: from the self, from the sane, from the ordinary. This time the escape hatch is offered by a fire that leaves the Berkeley Hills home of Ray and Julia Gaines a pile of smoldering rubble with a charred and unrecognizable corpse beneath it. Whose corpse is it: Ray's, or a looter's? Just where was Julia when the house burned down? And what happened to the brown-paper parcel Julia says she left in Ray's custody? Did it go up in flames, too, with or without him? Any number of sinister people want to know.
In classic noir manner, the story advances tableau by moody tableau from Baja bedroom to Key West bar deck to Tampa kitchenette, each offering its sharply etched character cameo, its fragment of information, its new complication, straight to a conclusion redolent with irony...."
Roger Downey, American Theater
"Raymond Chandler was a remarkable writer who, more than anyone (and that includes Hammett), set the tone for American detective fiction. It is a genre so yummily plummy as to warrant the parody with music In A PIG'S VALISE.... It is an amusing evening, as charming as it is clever.... Overmyer has two (in both senses) precious gifts: He spins words dizzyingly and is equally deft with genre. In ON THE VERGE, he gleamingly parodied the writings of Victorian women travelers and much more besides; In a less happy play, IN PERPETUITY THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE, he took on the cliches and stereotypes of right-wing paranoia. Now he goes all the way from Chandler to CHINATOWN, from Hammett...to Mickey Spillane.... The raunchy music of Kid Creole and the Coconuts--reggae and rap, funk and rhythm and blues--fits in W. C. Handily, and Overmyer's lyrics are only slightly less jolly than his dialogue and monologues...."
John Simon, New York
"Language-besotted as any die-hard cruciverbalist and hip to the self-referential existentialism of postmodern performance, he keeps his intellect in balance with a deep need to entertain; he's a clown with a thesaurus, an incorrigible punster, and a `prisoner of genre, a captive of kitsch,' like the all-singing, all-dancing, trench-coated gumshoe narrator of IN A PIG'S VALISE...off-Broadway hasn't had such a dazzling little musical since LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. And composer August Darnell (of Kid Creole and the Coconuts fame) is a perfect match for Overmyer's pulpy genre-mashing.... underneath the puns and wordplay, it is a metaphysical detective story about the origin of pop-kitsch (a theme throughout Overmyer's work) that treads the same territory as sci-fi renegades William Gibson and Philip K Dick...."
Don Shewey, 7 Days
ERIC OVERMYER COLLECTED PLAYS
ISBN 1-880399-33-4
A Smith and Kraus Book
$19.95