"I sat in a theater at the
Humana Festival last year, after the closing monologue of ONE
FLEA SPARE, unable to move. I had known Naomi Wallace's work
well, having directed an earlier play, and I knew she had
tremendous talent and promised to great things. Nothing had
prepared me--not my admiration for her plays and for her
beautiful, harsh, moving, brilliantly political poetry--for the
experience of watching this play, which is in my opinion one of
the finest works of dramatic literature written here or in
England in the last two decades. Utterly without sentiment but
possessed of a very great human heart, ONE FLEA SPARE touches
upon many things, class and gender and the pressures of a plague
upon internal and external human constructs; and, as I read it,
most devastatingly it addresses a tragedy of almost inexpressible
dimensions: the consequences of the horrors of biology and
Capital on the young. As the play draws to its shattering close I
was filled with thoughts of the children of Sarajevo and Rwanda
and the slums of America. `Almost' inexpressible except in the
hands of a true poet, and Naomi Wallace so magnificently proves
herself to be. Her ability to articulate the inarticulable, grief
and loss and suffering beyond endurance, is a source of hope; as
is the resilience and passion of the marvelous characters she's
assembled. Everyone who loves the theater should read this play.
It has made me INTENSELY envious and very full of joy."
Tony Kushner
"Naomi Wallace sharply
tightens her focus in this latest, thrillingly original work, set
for the most part in a virtually bare London room during the
Great Plague."
Jeremy Kingston, The Times
(London)
"Poetic...Naomi Wallace's
ONE FLEA SPARE is another example of fine, ambitious writing....
The London plague is evoked in statistics and the overwhelming
reality of quirky, Marivaux-like social role reversals in a
single room."
Michael Coveney, The
Observer (London)
"Naomi Wallace makes an
opaque but artful and haunting New York debut with her ONE FLEA
SPARE....
ONE FLEA SPARE is built to
provoke, not to distract, and it doesn't surrender its meanings
easily. But the play's powerful sexual subtext and its beautiful
poetic surface reveal an original theatrical imagination. Whether
Wallace will find a big audience remains to be seen. She has a
big talent, though. Wherever her plays are mounted, they're worth
finding."
John Lahr, The New Yorker
originally produced at the Bush
Theater, London
the U S premiere was at the Actors Theater of Louisville
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