Cover design and photography by Susan Mitchell
this collection contains:
TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS
NO MERCY
CASANOVA
LOSING FATHER'S BODY
"Connie, I believe, is a
genuine pioneer, a truly original writer who first arrived at a new theatrical
space, from whence a number of plays and playwrights, myself included, have
emerged. I do not mean by this that all her fellow playwrights are the children
of Connie Congdon. But in the early years of the previous decade a discovery was
waiting to be made, namely that the theater's peculiarities made it a
particularly resonant space for the staging of the kind of postmodern,
collective nervous breakdown American society has been having. Connie, among
those of us working within the tradition of narrative dramatic realism, and with
all due credit to her forebears, got there first. The discovery was too
important to disregard, leaving many of us who adopted her innovations feeling,
as Brecht writes in his journals, like the person who wrote the second
sonnet."
from the introduction by Tony
Kushner
TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS:
"If not the best new play
of recent years, surely this is the most imaginative. Constance
Congdon's brilliant off-Broadway script wryly deflects the story
of a man with Alzheimer's disease into a travel guide to Middle
America conducted by aliens."
William Henry III, Time
"Constance Congdon's TALES
OF THE LOST FORMICANS is a treat in so many ways—starting with
its deliciously wry title....you shouldn't miss it: Congdon is a
new voice, and her innumerable small triumphs are achieved with a
freshness of spirit, with a humor and charm so distinctively
individual, that one just wants to hear more and more from
her.... Congdon's aliens are a fluidly shifting metaphor for her
own complex relation to the subject of her drama, a lower-middle
suburban family coping with three generations' worth of stress
simultaneously...."
Michael Feingold, Village
Voice
"...a savagely
uncompromising play of searching insights, biting wit and all too
recognizable home truths... There are laughs, wit and humor, but
this is a chillingly painful play. Congdon is a terrific
playwright with sure command of language and her
subject...."
Polly Warfield, Drama-Logue
"Congdon's writing creates
dialogue that crackles with wit, imagination and incisive
passion...."
A J Esta, Drama-Logue
originally produced by the Actors Theater of Louisville
4 M, 3 F
also available in an acting edition
published by B P P I:
TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS
NO MERCY:
Winner of Actors Theater of Louisville Great American Play Contest:
"...It begins in 1945 at
the Jormada del Muerto area in New Mexico, where Robert
Oppenheimer and other scientists were putting together the atom
bomb, and it moves into the present through the life of a
soldier, Ray, who was one of the witnesses to the first blast....
There's an elegance to NO MERCY,
a sense of suspended opinion, that lends it a mysterious,
evocative air.... NO MERCY is a rare work in the theater In that
it doesn't make a judgment on nuclear technology except to say
that we created something terrifying in the name of the highest
human enterprise in ingenuity, and forty years later we still
don't know what to do about it."
Lawrence Christon, Los
Angeles Times
6 M, 3 F
TALES OF THE
LOST FORMICANS AND OTHER PLAYS
T C G, I S B N: 1-55936-084-4, $14.95.