cover photo by Peter Cunningham
this collection contains three full-length plays:
DARK RAPTURE
IN PERPETUITY THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE
ON THE VERGE
DARK RAPTURE:
"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
IN PERPETUTIY THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE:
"Paranoia produces profits
in the dark, dangerous world created by Eric Overmyer's IN
PERPETUITY THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE, a strange, sinister
comedy.... Overmyer is a dazzling verbal acrobat as well as a
serious student of pop culture. Both linguist and cultural
anthropologist get a workout here.... A darker expedition,
probing the fears and prejudices of society. Overmyer makes it a
wild unnerving ride."
Michael Kuchwara, A P
"One of the most
fascinating new scripts I've encountered in recent years....
Overmyer's intellectually nimble play does not yield to easy
summary, but, in brief, it deals with bright young adults who
ghost-write hatebooks for powerful bigots. Such is Overmyer's
tricky dramaturgy that four members of the cast play both Good
Guys and Bad Guys...it deserves to find its way to the stages of
many resident professional theaters."
Wayne Johnson, Seattle Times
"Thanks to writing skills
unequalled among American playwrights, brilliant wordsmith Eric
Overmyer transforms all this paranoia into a theatrical
witch-hunt titled IN PERPETUITY THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE....
Overmyer speaks from the heart of the Twenieth Century."
Richard Stayton, Los Angeles
Herald Examiner
ON THE VERGE:
"Cross the wordplay of S J Perelman with
the world-in-a-time-warp vision of Caryl Churchill and you might approximate the
special flavor of ON THE VERGE. In Eric Overmyer's chimerical new comedy, three
Victorian lady explorers set out on an adventure that takes them to darkest
Africa, highest Himalaya and Terra Incognita....
Blending Tom Stoppard's limber linguistics with the historic overview of a
Thornton Wilder, Mr Overmyer takes his audience on a mirthful safari...spinning
into time travel.
Three `sister sojourners', each a prototypical Victorian lady explorer, equipped
with dialog as pithy as their helmets, thwack their machetes through the
wilderness while telling tales of past jaunts among the natives. As intrepid
trekkers, they put the lie to any charge that they are representatives of a
weaker sex. Mr Overmyer has written a play that is joyfully feminist.
Heroines to their heart, the explorers can accommodate themselves to any
emergency (natural or man-made), although they are momentarily disoriented as
they approach modern times. In their kaleidoscopic adventure, they journey
through a rain forest of hundreds of artifacts from the future—household
utensils, mechanical contrivances and a side-view automobile mirror that reads
`Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear'. How does one deal with such
a chimera?...
In the play there is wit within the palaver. As one traveler says, `I have seen
the future and it is slang'. The author himself is an ecologist of language and
a shrewd observer of our quest to control our environment—and the environment
of others....
A frolicsome jaunt through a continuum of space, time, history,
geography, feminism and fashion, Mr Overmyer's cavalcade is on the verge of becoming a
thoroughly serendipitous journey."
Mel Gussow, The New York Times
PLAYS BY ERIC OVERMYER
I S B N: 0-88145-153-3, $16.95