Bøger udgivet af BROADWAY PLAY PUB INC (NY)

An adaptation of Gorky's classic black comedy, VASSA ZHELEZNOVA, A MOTHER concerns a family's stern, penny-pinching matriarch who will do anything for her family. "... Dark, invigoratingly sardonic...Constance Congdon's MOTHER is as uncompromisingly savvy as it is bitingly funny... MOTHER is an exhilarating blend of one of Chekhov's dysfunctional provincial families run through the wringer of Joe Orton's iconoclastic comedy. It's also Maxim Gorky through and through, providing a canny look at Gorky as a dramatic bridge between Chekhov and Brecht. Congdon's A MOTHER is adapted from Gorky's play VASSA ZHELEZNOVA...MOTHER [is] as much an enlightening rediscovery as an exciting new play. Vassa, a kind of proto-Mother Courage, is the head of a family one generation removed from serfdom and facing a crisis. The husband with whom she's built a fairly successful peat-mining and tile-making business is dying upstairs. Without a will, all their possessions will pass to their two sons-the uselessly self-pitying Pavel and the slothful, self-indulgent Semyon, a man who can no longer fit into any of his clothes except pajamas. Congdon's dialogue is crisp, her Gorky-derived characters captivating and her wit devilishly sharp..." Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle

"Politicians poised to sling mud might take a pointer or two from A R Gurney: Good manners can be lethal weapons, and a glancing sideswipe may cause more damage than a punch in the nose. An expert demonstration of such tactics is on ... in Mr Gurney's disarming new play, MRS FARNSWORTH ... Though it deals with revelations that are the stuff of smear campaigns, MRS FARNSWORTH is as polite and sweetly subversive a political attack as you're likely ever to come across. ...Mr Gurney's latest offering feels as if it's spoken out of the side of the mouth, sotto voce through a firmly locked jaw. Well, jaws would be locked, as this is Gurney country, land of the endangered species called WASP ... fine specimens of this breed: wealthy, inhibited folk who wear their sense of entitlement with sheepishness and smugness. They're people you might run across at a Bush fund-raiser. Mr Bush, however, would be woefully mistaken to perceive them as allies ... MRS FARNSWORTH is set in a creative-writing class in Manhattan, run by a sardonic, harried teacher named Gordon. Class is under way when a resplendently well-groomed student makes a late and incongruous entrance, like a rara avis in an urban pigeon coop. That's the pastel-clad Marjorie Farnsworth, fresh from the Connecticut suburbs and fluttering with apologies. It seems she wants to learn to write because she has a story that urgently needs to be told. It's the tale of a Vassar girl who becomes pregnant by a hard-partying Yale boy, who then pays her (by proxy) to have an abortion. Mrs Farnsworth's narrative starts to sound like a memoir in which only the names have been changed. Could be the boy in question be the young George W Bush? The left-leaning Gordon is atremble with excitement. Despite surface evidence, Mrs Farnsworth is a registered Democrat, deeply concerned about the state of the nation and keen on making her tale public. There is, however, one serious problem, she says: her disapproving husband. Enter Mr Farnsworth, with the contained apprehension and curiosity of a Victorian explorer in darkest Africa. It wouldn't be cricket, as the Farnsworths might put it, to divulge more. Though MRS FARNSWORTH is essentially a debate play, there is nothing dry about it and little that's predictable. This despite Mr and Mrs Farnsworth's being utterly true to their high WASP form, with all the expected geographical references (Fisher's Island, Greenwich) and locutions ('Pardon my French'). As one of Mr Gurney's playwriting antecedents, Philip Barry, said in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, there are no rules for human beings, including pure-bred, thin-blooded WASPs. As Mr and Mrs Farnsworth present their respective cases to Gordon and his students, they reveal unexpected facets. Neither emerges as someone entirely to be trusted, but both come off as people of good faith. That is more than can be said of the focus of their argument, Mr Bush, who by the play's end has been effectively cut open and found empty ... Mr and Mrs Farnsworth may be prisoners of their class and its superficial trappings. But like the central figures in Mr Gurney's COCKTAIL HOUR and LATER LIFE, they harbor doubts and conflict beneath their decorous surfaces. While breeding usually trumps their more rebellious instincts, it's not before a human heart is glimpsed within the cartoonish outlines ... Mrs Farnsworth is obviously longing to escape her identity and doomed to fail. It's the longing that makes you like her so much ... 'Political writing and political discussions are simple-minded and reductive, ' Mr Farnsworth says. That's the opposite, he continues, of good writing, 'which should be subtle, complicated and ambiguous.' Even standing on a soapbox, Mr Gurney happily heeds Mr Farnsworth's admonition." -Ben Brantley, The New York Times

While leading a tour of the haphazardly restored home of the Confederate general, a young African American docent suddenly has a revelation. An uproar ensues as she abruptly stops the tour and asks an affluent white couple if she can come home with them - as their slave! But the most astonishing moments are still to come ... A sophisticated, yet unrestrained rampage through the well-intentioned, but agenda-laden forces of the politically correct. "The gloves come off early in STONEWALL JACKSON'S HOUSE, Jonathan Reynolds's caustic comic tirade against political orthodoxy. A woebegone black guide leading a group through the haphazardly restored home of the Confederate general suddenly stops the tour to ask a well-to-do white couple from Ohio if she can come home with them, as their slave. It's a provocative moment: where is this playwright, who so deliciously savaged film making fifteen years ago in GENIUSES, headed with this tasteless conceit? Mercifully, not to a scene depicting modern slavery. The revolving panels of the play's simple set are eventually pushed aside to reveal the rehearsal room of a small theater company whose self-righteous administrators, interviewing playwrights for the new season, denounce the play the audience has just sampled. With that, Mr Reynolds climbs on his soapbox for a ambling, funny, cranky and highly entertaining diatribe against all the agenda-laden forces and high-minded programs (especially of the liberal stripe) that he believes have conspired to wring common sense out of American political and cultural life. Affirmative action, political correctness, nontraditional casting, the welfare state, black studies, ethnocentrism, multiculturalism: Mr Reynolds pushes so many buttons he could have staged the play in an elevator ... You don't have to agree with Mr Reynolds's inexhaustible supply of opinions to get a kick out of this ... The plot of STONEWALL JACKSON'S HOUSE takes several outrageous turns, culminating in a hilariously radical restaging of the tour-guide scene along lines more politically palatable to the theater company's old guard ... But maybe a little more unvarnished spleen-venting is just what the theater needs." -Peter Marks, The New York Times "In STONEWALL JACKSON'S HOUSE, Jonathan Reynolds has created an American play of ideas much in the manner of Paddy Chayefsky, with intelligent characters expressing their philosophies with a wit that sparkles and stabs at the same time." -Howard Waxman, Variety "... the funniest and most outrageous play of the season, a withering fusillade of satire aimed at our comfortably congealed political orthodoxies. He's brought brainy cantankerousness back with a vengeance." -Jack Kroll, Newsweek

This collection includes three full-length plays, WEST MEMPHIS MOJO, SQUATS, and DARK RIVER, and one short play, OLD SOLIDERS. WEST MEMPHIS MOJO: Set in a black barbershop in Arkansas, 1955, WEST MEMPHIS MOJO sings the unsung heroes of the blues tradition. A young songwriter, working as a shoeshine boy, collaborates with the shop owner and a small-time recording artist to create new blues tunes. Amidst racial tensions and the politics of the white-owned music industry, this play explodes with the conflicts surrounding each character's pursuit of the American dream. SQUATS: A diverse group of homeless people, from a pregnant teenager to a thirty-year-old mental patient to a street musician in his forties, struggle to survive. DARK RIVER: Explores what happens when a family business has unintentionally poisoned their town. OLD SOLIDERS: It is Armistice Day, 1962. Three veterans of the World Wars exchange army stories, lament the vagaries of age, and wait for the arrival of Harry, their old army buddy. OLD SOLDIERS is about friendship, loyalty, and the very personal realities of war. WEST MEMPHIS MOJO "WEST MEMPHIS MOJO ... written with skill and wit by Martin Jones, is set in a barbershop in West Memphis, Arkansas, in November, 1955, when rock and roll was starting to take off - when, that is, white record companies and other entrepreneurs were making forays into rhythm and blues ... The story is a simple one, though none the less powerful for that ... What matters most of all, of course, is the absolute authenticity of character and emotion. Mr Jones is a very good writer ..." -Edith Oliver, The New Yorker SQUATS "... SQUATS portrays what it is to be young and human in a world defined by poverty, homelessness, mental illness, prostitution, domestic abuse, arson, alcoholism, suicide, teen-age pregnancy and AIDS. But SQUATS is neither preachy nor overdone. It doesn't take on a shopping list of societal ills. Rather, they are the landscape for the characters. Problems intertwine and contribute to each other. Though this landscape is bleak, the plot and the quirky characters are not ... It is written with insight and compassion." -Barbara Bartels, The Times Record DARK RIVER "... DARK RIVER concerns a failing family business that has inadvertently poisoned the waters ... DARK RIVER is an environmental Crime and Punishment ... Yet DARK RIVER transcends mere allegory. Jones uses pollution as a metaphor for the sins of the fathers ..." -W D Cutlip, Casco Bay Weekly

"The theater is by its very nature a con game. Starting with the playwright and the actors, down to the designer's paper moon and cardboard sea, all conspire to deceive the audience into buying into an illusion. And somewhere backstage is the mastermind of manipulation, the director, pulling all the strings that, if it works, will completely takes us in for two or three hours and maybe, if we're lucky, show us something about ourselves we never before suspected. As with all con games, the stakes are sometimes higher than at other times, both for the actors onstage and the audience. In THE DIRECTOR, a funny, suspenseful and thoroughly entertaining new play by Nancy Hasty, the ante keeps getting raised until the games becomes a matter of life and death. THE DIRECTOR is a seductive play that gradually lures the audience into unwitting mental participation in Peter's methods and builds to a white-knuckle ending ..." Wilborn Hampton, The New York Times "After the recent Broadway failures of VOICES IN THE DARK and WAIT UNTIL DARK audiences might consider the thriller genre as dead as the corpses populating Scream 3... Unless, that is, one knows how to reinvent and revitalize the form, as playwright Nancy Hasty had done with her thoroughly absorbing new experiment in terror, THE DIRECTOR... In structure, THE DIRECTOR is a series of acting exercises a legit director meticulously plans and instigates for his new company of actors. A true theater animal, he is the kind of control freak who does not believe in full disclosure at any point in the creative process... The pattern of education--or is it simply abuse? --repeats itself until finally they make the ultimate moral decision to end their commitment to the process. The consequences of their collective action is more chilling than a vat of fake blood spilled in a dozen slasher movies." Robert Hofler, Variety