cover art by Elihu Vedder
six one-acts:
FLOWERS
TAPE
A TIGER IN CENTRAL PARK
GAS
THE CROOKED CROSS
THE WINGED MAN
"José Rivera's GIANTS HAVE
US IN THEIR BOOKS, is subtitled `Six Children's Plays for
Adults'. The genesis of the plays, he explains in a program note,
was his four-year-old daughter's observation that, if we have
giants in our fairy tales, they must have us in theirs. Rivera
wrote the plays, he says, `as if we were the subject of fairy
tales told by giants.'
It's an apt notion. The six
short plays in GIANTS have all the beautiful simplicity of fairy
tales....
Rivera's prose has become more
concentrated and spare, more pregnant with metaphor and poetry.
The profuse and sometimes self-consciously fantastical stew of
magic realism—which, like his mentor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Rivera insists is just another form of everyday reality—has been
condensed so that each image carries greater weight. The six
short fables in GIANTS add up to two hours of compelling,
entertaining and provocative theater."
Robert Hurwitt, San
Francisco Examiner
originally produced at the Magic Theater, San Francisco
3 M, 3 F
I S B N: 0-88145-141-X, $8.95