Kirjahaku

Playwright and actor David Greenspan has been a leading figure in Manhattan's downtown performance scene for over twenty years. His numerous accolades include a Guggenheim fellowship and four Obie Awards for his acting and writing, and most recently a fifth Obie for Sustained Achievement. Tony Kushner once declared Greenspan "probably all-around the most talented theater artist of my generation," and the New York Times has called his performances "irresistible." The Myopia and Other Plays brings together five of Greenspan's most important works, accompanied by a critical introduction and new interview with the playwright.Greenspan's work---often semiautobiographical, always psychologically intense---deals with issues of memory, family, doubt, and sexuality. The plays in this collection take particular interest in the motivations for erotic and aesthetic expression, forces inextricably linked in Greenspan's world. Critic and scholar Marc Robinson's informative introduction and lively interview with Greenspan further increase the collection's appeal to lovers of inventive playwriting, as well as students and scholars in the fields of Performance Studies, English, American Studies, and LGBT Studies.

Playwright and actor David Greenspan has been a leading figure in Manhattan's downtown performance scene for over twenty years. His numerous accolades include a Guggenheim fellowship and four Obie Awards for his acting and writing, and most recently a fifth Obie for Sustained Achievement. Tony Kushner once declared Greenspan "probably all-around the most talented theater artist of my generation," and the New York Times has called his performances "irresistible." The Myopia and Other Plays brings together five of Greenspan's most important works, accompanied by a critical introduction and new interview with the playwright.Greenspan's work---often semiautobiographical, always psychologically intense---deals with issues of memory, family, doubt, and sexuality. The plays in this collection take particular interest in the motivations for erotic and aesthetic expression, forces inextricably linked in Greenspan's world. Critic and scholar Marc Robinson's informative introduction and lively interview with Greenspan further increase the collection's appeal to lovers of inventive playwriting, as well as students and scholars in the fields of Performance Studies, English, American Studies, and LGBT Studies.

In Go Back to Where You Are God offers Passalus, a failed actor from ancient Athens festering in hell, the opportunity of redemption by returning to Earth to free a young woman from her domineering mother, Claire, a distinguished stage actress. Passalus accepts the proposal with the understanding that on completing his mission his soul be annihilated. God agrees - with the caveat that Passalus not become entangled in the lives of others. Granted the ability to shape-shift, Passalus assumes the role of a British matron and former actress, arriving at Claire's summer home during a week-end in which she is hosting friends and family. But Passalus is also equipped to hear the inner thoughts of the characters he encounters - and armed with knowledge of their suffering is unable to remain aloof. He also finds himself falling in love with Claire's brother, Bernard, the underappreciated author of eccentric comedies. The play dramatizes second chances in love - and love that facilitates the soul's release from hell into life again.

In She Stoops to Comedy Alexandra Page a self-involved actress known for her portrayals of tragic heroines disguises herself as a man in order to play Orlando opposite her girlfriend Alison Rose who has been cast as Rosalind in an out-of-town production of As You Like It. Because the role of Alexandra is played by a man her transformation does not require the use of drag. And because the other actors in the As You Like It cast are friends of Alexandra and Alison - and

Six-time Obie Award-winning actor and playwright David Greenspan has adapted Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a wryly lyrical fable of fate love and the transformative magic of theater. This quiet masterpiece - a dazzling rumination on the nature of love - is a richly multifaceted tale of five travelers in colonial Peru who are hurled to their deaths by a collapsing bridge.ÿ "Beautifully scripted... Greenspan's version is efficient (75 minutes not six hours) playful and most of all dexterous with language. Lines are frequently in verse and even the prose passages are vibrantly lyrical. It is a whimsical fairy tale about big themes like love longing loss and loneliness but it is first a paean to the joys and powers of words." - NJ.com"Daring... both play and novel trace these fibrous knotty and doomed characters across time and space as they weave around each other precariously entwined frayed from mishaps and misery before plunging to their fore-announced deaths." - The Wall Street Journal"Greenspan's writing possesses a musical quality that never detracts from Wilder's examination of among other things life death relationships destiny and divine intention... Wilder fans will appreciate that Greenspan has left much of Wilder's text intact." - Aaron Krause Theatrical Musings

This is a book borne of its nouns, its noun-ness: boy, girl, child, mother, milk, horse, sky, meat, knives, god, ghost, box-cutter, bones. As its reader, I am made to hold these things, their thinginess, in the hands of sentences that make the mundane sing and lean and turn its tongue towards the fantastic. I want to pick up my own pencil and rub it against such singular strangeness. This book is the dark play of a writer who refuses to grow up or grow old and who is old enough to know that children "drink milk from each other's eyes. The oldest child, her teeth are nickels and the youngest plants them inside his chest, A voice sings Hallelujah, and then Thank you, thank you, thank you." I'm thankful that this book has found its way to my own eyes. I am made to see things in ways that only David Greenspan can.-Peter MarkusDavid Greenspan's Milk Sickness raises up language both wholly unexpected yet hauntingly familiar, like a nightmare you forgot you had. A hypnotic read. -J. A. Tyler, author of Only and Ever This