NEW ACQUISITIONS
Last update: June 16, 2003
Available in manuscript only at $12.95 for each full-length play
FRANNY'S WAY
Richard Nelson
"Boundaries warp and melt in the dense
urban heat that pervades FRANNY'S WAY, Richard Nelson's sensitively drawn
portrait of love in the age of J D Salinger. The lines between childhood and
adulthood blur disorientingly for the three generations of characters gathered
in a cramped apartment in Greenwich Village at the height of summer in the
1950s.
...Mr Nelson is again exploring a shadowy sexuality with which some theatergoers
may not be entirely at ease.
...FRANNY'S WAY is a wry, rueful and forgiving look
at the ways people turn to one another for solace when they feel they have
lost their bearings.
Sex, as the interplay among the characters gently and insistently reminds you,
may be a primal drive, but it doesn't always follow a straight course. Mr
Nelson continues to give compassionate and insightful life to such erotic
waywardness."
Ben Brantley, The New York Times
"...one of the deftest achievements of Nelson's taut script is his crafting a dialogue of indirection. Hurts and jealousies roil beneath petty arguments over hogging time in the bathroom. Primal longings for affection well up in comments about the steamy jazz wafting in from a club beneath the window."Alisa Solomon, Village Voice
1 M, 4 F
GHOSTS
Henrik Ibsen/Anthony Clarvoe
"Playwright Henrik Ibsen was
way ahead of his time. GHOSTS, first staged in 1881, examined
family relationships and their dark underside in a way never
before explored on stage. His treatment of venereal disease and
potential incest--although neither is openly described--so
scandalized Victorian Norway that the play was not presented
there. It was first staged in Chicago.
Today, 115 years later, Ibsen's
treatment of these issues is more tragic and ironic than
startling, especially in a new translation by Anthony Clarvoe....
...his new version focuses on
Ibsen's satiric edge, often underlining the hypocrisy of the
characters. Seen through Clarvoe's filter, GHOSTS highlights
human weakness in a way that speaks to us today.
Clarvoe has made each of the five
characters more understandable to contemporary audiences by
reducing the stiffness and formality of their language. The
entire action of GHOSTS is less than a day's time, played out
completely in a parlor in a modest 19th century home in a small
Scandinavian town....
In spite of the serious subject,
GHOSTS is not without humor. Ibsen was a social satirist, and
Clarvoe's translation heightens his focus."
Nick Pender, Cincinnatti
City-Post
3 M, 2 F
THE MISANTHROPE
Moliere/Constance Congdon
"Love is all bad sonnets, big
fluffy beds and silly preening in the first half of THE MISANTHROPE... Then the
gloves come off...and the characters are fighting for their lives.
Moliere's 1666 comedy about yearning for truth and love in a world of
self-serving hypocrites never falls out of fashion.... The play is recast here
in a tonic new verse version by Constance Congdon...
This is a world...where words do all the damage.
Playwright Congdon ("Tales of the Lost Formicans") has done an
exemplary job of making that language count. Her rhymes are not as elegant as
those in Richard Wilbur's standard verse translation, and that's the point.
There's a lean angularity in her lines, a flashing sense of purpose."
Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle
8M, 3F
MONSTER
Neal Bell
from the novel FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley
"MONSTER, a slick and streamlined new
stage adaptation of the Frankenstein saga written by Neal Bell...is faithful to
Shelley, if not in all the exhaustive details, then at least insofar as it
seizes on its thematic highlights.
Mr Bell's adaptation pucks the major events from the narrative, and his language
treads a colorful path: a mixture of fanciful poetics, glib wisecrackery and an
occasional Anglo-Saxon obscenity that lends a contemporary tint to things."
Bruce Weber, The New York Times
"...a lean literate version of
Shelley's often much-embroidered classic.
Exploring Shelley's psychosexual undertones, Bell's version is more creepy than
shocking in effect. He also provides a viable new conclusion for the novel's
open-ended narrative."
Michael Sommers, The Star-Ledger
"Starting from Shelley's original, but
with a sharp eye for cogency and a sharp ear for the turn of a phrase, [Neal
Bell] has managed to locate the philosophic germ inside each of the horror
myth's iconic scenes. The scare is still there, but it now has other functions
than merely frightening your inner child with fantasies of impotence, rape and
castration on a dark and stormy night. If you really want to frighten yourself,
there's always today's paper; if you want a dramatic story that makes you think
about the meaning and purpose of life, you should probably go and see
MONSTER."
Michael Finegold, Village Voice
5 M, 2 F
THE SEAGULL
Anton Chekhov, adapted by Richard Nelson
Chekhov
on THE SEAGULL:
“It's a comedy with three female and six male roles, four acts, a landscape (view of a lake), lots of talk of literature, little action and 180 lbs of love.”
THREE SISTERS
Anton Chekhov, adapted by Richard Nelson
Chekhov
on THREE SISTERS:
“But what I have written is a farce.”
Stanislavsky
on THREE SISTERS:
“[Chekhov] was afraid of provincial life being exaggerated and
caricatured, of his officers being turned into the usual heel-clickers with
jingling spurs. He wanted us to play the parts of simple, charming, decent
people in ‘untheatrical’ uniforms which looked as if they'd actually been
worn.”
THE WOOD DEMON
Anton Chekhov, adapted by Richard Nelson
Chekhov
on THE WOOD DEMON:
“In the play I portray a disgusting, selfish, provincial fellow who for
twenty years has been reading works on art but understand nothing about the
subject--a man who brings despondency and gloom to all those near him, who is
not accessible to laughter and music--and who, despite all this, is undoubtedly
happy.”