Bøger udgivet af 53rd State Press

Drama. Poetry. California Interest. Somewhere between monologue and stage direction, the one-act plays in THE INVENTION OF MONSTERS / PLAYS FOR THE THEATRE center around what it means to be ill-cast in life. How it feels to wear a costume, a body, a face. How sex can be both transformative and nightmarish. Each scene-poem is the tip of an iceberg, evoking a larger performance rather than operating as a conventional script. A new kind of theatre text, these plays/poems beg to be performed, with exactly how depending entirely on the reader.

Drama. Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. A mother attempts suicide and fails. Life goes on, but as her family picks up the pieces, gratitude mixes with sadness & anger at the attempted departure. In this dream-like play in verse, blood becomes a character, hearts are fed to the stage, and Dialogue delivers a monologue as Justin tries to determine whether he can truly forgive or forget what has been done.

Drama. Poetry. It's easy to dismiss the Holy Ghost People. They travel door- to-door in white sheets spouting pseudoscience about time travel, wormholes, and a new galactic gospel. Most of the town has already laughed them away. But when the Holy Ghost People start to perform "miracles," denial becomes difficult, and conversation quickly shifts to what ought to be done. A new play in verse about science, religion, and group mentality by poet Joshua Young.

Psalms for the Wreckage collects Joshua Young's trilogy of scripts in verse—To the Chapel of Light (Mud Luscious Press, 2012), When the Wolves Quit (Gold Wake Press, 2012), and a third, previously unpublished play in verse This is the Way to Rule—in a single edition. Exploring faith, dogma, and the politics of power, Psalms for the Wreckage is a stunning collection of poetic, epistolary playwriting as well as a fascinating look at one author's evolving relationship with genre.

Drama. Poetry. California Interest. Through a mix of sound-poems, dance, and traditional scenes, Catherine Theis attempts to jostle Medea from her traditional, male-defined narrative in this modern retelling set in the mountains of Montana. A 2015 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers finalist, MEDEA features a Chorus of Flames, choreography for The Milky Way, and a collection of palate-cleansing satyr plays to be performed after. Grappling with both love and language, Theis' MEDEA "wants to join with the world, to meld with it. Let's let her do that--see what falls away."

Drama. Poetry. A one-act play in which apologies must be made to Chekhov. A one-act play in which there is a blueprint, & that blueprint is ignored entirely. A one-act play in which a decision is made, but it is unclear by or for whom. A one-act play in which the wind has the smallest hands, no, even smaller than that. Over the course of 41 one-act plays--most of them starring the characters ME and YOU--Dalton Day investigates grief, love, anxiety, and loss in this stunning collection of dramatic poetry.

Drama. Fiction. It's the end of the end of the world and the house that holds together our universe is quietly falling apart. Mike Kleine's existential play THE MYSTERY OF THE SEVENTEEN PILOT FISH is as much about a detective solving his final case as it is the definitive who, what, why, when, where, how & how much of just about everything you have ever imagined.

Drama. Poetry. California Interest. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Honey, our protagonist, is on the run from both her past and her present; avoiding questions about love, bodies, language, and the extents of all three. But her friends--the impish Maenads--refuse to just let her escape. THE SHAPES WE MAKE WITH OUR BODIES is a feminist, queer, maximalist piece--spanning caves, hills, courtrooms, and kitchens about a woman torn by her desires, unwilling to bend to the needs of men, yet hesitant in the face of her wildness.

In Brief Chronicle, Books 6-8, Agnes Borinsky delivers a play in a single column. A history play that grounds epic themes--longing, violence and imperialism, and the bond between mother and son--in the quiet ways we talk.

"The book flinches like a school of fish, a murmuration, a murder nation, my colonizer's baby handprint on a paneled wall in a farmhouse in Ovid, Michigan. The book unearths burial mounds and flattens them into fields. My ancestors removed the bones, and I removed arrowheads from the creek, and I held them to my heart, and I searched the grass for blood, but all I saw was a starling. She hid her eggs in my chest, and when I drifted to sleep I saw black-winged, nameless shadows. This is the Book of Lily."In Faun, Brandi George explores the sudden erasure of human and nonhuman populations from her hometown of Ovid, Michigan. Embodying various voices, forms, and media, a young girl named Lily undergoes a series of transformations guided by nymphs, flora, and fauna. A reworking of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Faun also reflects on the themes of sexual violence that often occur in the mythic.

"I told you how I blamed you for so much, your fist blooming into a prismed silence, a spectral callfor quiet, cheering from the chorus as your fist anointsliquid mercury to my lips, the sign to all that I havesuccumbed to your weight, wordless. Brother, if you called for purple, I would give you amethystfrom my mouth; if blue, water and a sail."Guided by Dante, Freud, and a pantheon of other literary and mythical figures, Justin Limoli travels to hell and back in this new play about brotherhood, loss, and what it means to keep writing when all you write about is grief. A stand-alone work as well as a follow-up to Bloodletting in Minor Scales [A Canvas in Arms.], Limoli's latest blurs the intersection of play and poetry even further, creating something both beautiful and wholly unique in the process.

You feel The Spiral unfurling within you. You're moving carefully, carelessly (take your pick), past a window or a tree or a person, and in the back of your head suddenly you hear the voice of the Spiral wheeze: "Onward and upward and outward, this is growth, this is evolution. You are in this city and I am here too, with you and without you. I'm here to connect you with the outside, with what's been trying to get in, trying to get you on and up and out. Take my hand and you can be as elastic and as flexible as me. I'll stretch your insides thinner and thinner until finally you'll be able to expand, extend, expend yourself onward and upward and outward, and you'll escape this city, you'll escape that window and that tree and that person, every person that you feel such love/hate/indifference for (take your pick) and you'll grow thinner and paler and ever more transparent, but you'll be taller and longer and your eyes will be clearer and your imaginary embrace will encompass not only this city but all cities, all worlds, and your compassion will exceed even that of God's by virtue of your complete, utter, perfect inability to act on it, to spend it, to waste it on anyone at all. You'll finally be able to keep your love to yourself, untouched, untapped, pure and deep and preserved by your own inevitable valueless hate. And together we'll continue to unfurl, carefully, carelessly (take your pick), until we cover so much space that regardless of what we look like to others we'll know that we've discovered something we can finally un-call Truth." And you say: "Fuck off Spiral, I have shit to do." A full-length debut on communication, intimacy, and despair as told through poetry, dreamscapes, and scenes from an existential sitcom, Adam Lauver's The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One) will lovingly reach down your throat and pull out a series of vaguely Jurassic noises you can't quite identify as a laugh or a sob.

It's the first debate of the 2004 presidential campaign and President George W. Bush is determined to kill PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer live on stage. His opponent, Senator Kerry, agrees Lehrer should die--"Indeed, what else tonight besides the manner of Jim Lehrer's execution could be of interest to any man?"--but disagrees on the matter of when and where. 12 years later, Jim Lehrer sits alone in his spacious and indifferently furnished DC suburban home narrating to himself the news of the day. That is until his roommate--also Jim Lehrer--rushes in to warn him of an angry mob descending on their location. Collected here for the first time, Chicago playwright Mickle Maher's The Jim Lehrer Plays--The Strangerer and Jim Lehrer and the Theater and its Double and Jim Lehrer's Double--connect and critique their times' political insanities while pulling inspiration from Camus, Artaud, and Maher's favorite news personality, Jim Lehrer.

Emerging from a densely layered collaboration between performers, audience, visual environment, and sound, In Which _______ and Others Discover the End grapples with the current generation's collective, unconscious anxiety that the world may in the foreseeable future be uninhabitable for humans. Taking inspiration from scientific discoveries (the identification of a new knee ligament, a new class of mathematical shape, the previously unknown mating spot of the blue whale) that are continually updating what we think we know, In Which asks us to acknowledge that we live in a world of uncertainty through an expansive rumination on the ways we embody polarity, mystery, mortality, discovery, and change. In Which _______ and Others Discover the End is a collaboration between performance collective SuperGroup and experimental playwright Rachel Jendrzejewski. This publication includes illustrations of the original performance, music notation, and a foreword by Lara D. Nielsen.

People disappear without explanation. The government takes hostages. War and death occur without reason or meaning. The cycle of poverty and deprivation proliferates. A Failed Performance is a collection of bizarre and darkly humorous plays and scenes from the Russian avant-garde writer Daniil Kharms. This collection--the first volume in English dedicated entirely to Kharms's dramatic works--includes his major stage plays Elizaveta Bam and Lapa as well as lesser-known sketches and hybrid poem-plays, most of which were never published or performed during his lifetime.

Context, Synecdoche, Homonym, and Polyseme live in a house laden with clutter, but Etymology keeps bringing new deliveries for Context: a blank book, a conversation with the dentist, a key. Homonym and Polyseme sort and rearrange; they send what they can to the cloud (via helium balloon); occasionally they smuggle out old things, lost for years, and new things they know Context will never need. Synecdoche tries to hold it all together and sings. Meanwhile, Context wonders whether listening is work—if it is labor, if it matters, and if what matters (if it matters) can be retrieved from the ever-accumulating material of living. meronymy is a kaleidoscopic, audiovisual performance-portrait of the technologies, ancient and modern, by which we cling to what we might otherwise forget. With wry tenderness and formal dexterity, Jendrzejewski builds a space in which to reckon with memory, loss, intrusion, and overflow amidst the cacophonic practice of living in language together.

La Guía de campo de iLANDing contiene 75partituras para la investigación de espacios urbanos que fueron desarrolladas alo largo de diez años por el Laboratorio Interdisciplinario de Arte, Naturalezay Danza. En estos laboratorios, artistas y científicos generaban metodologíashíbridas para un acercamiento a la ecología urbana fundamentado en la danza ydiseñado para cualquiera que desee experimentar la incursión de la naturalezaen la ciudad o descentrar los métodos antropocéntricos habituales de navegarpor el mundo. Lleva una introducción de la fundadora de iLAND, Jennifer Monson.

The Incomplete Amber Reed is a rigorously incomplete compendium of Amber Reed‿s partial, unfinished, and excerpted plays and fragments, including at least scenes from Scenes with Joyce Cho, The Grand Kindness, Mr. Apocope, The Aiken Character Calendar Book of Hours, Augustine of Hippo, and The Minister‿s Black Veil, her adaptation-with-vegetables of Nathaniel Hawthorne‿s story of the same name. A member of Joyce Cho‿the group of five weird, wily, lyrical, ludicrous playwrights whose total disregard for the realistic manifestation of their extravagant and poetic scenarios has revolutionized or at least revolted the modern American theater‿Amber Reed‿s writing is protean and quicksilvery. She moves from one experiment to the next, never settling, addressing our perfections, and yet in her flight so unsettling the theatrical landscape that she makes perfection itself démodé. In its incomprehensiveness, this collection eschews the notion that these plays are to be comprehended‿reduced, contained, explained, or “gottenâ€? like a gumball from a gumball machine. As Mac Wellman writes of Joyce Cho, “I do not understand the work of these writers in the same way I do not understand the sky, the sea, and the secret of the forest. They are unlike any others I know in the theater of our time.â€? Or in Reed‿s words, “I was here for this.â€?

David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group’s I Understand Everything Better is a "deeply felt and deeply moving" (New York Times) performance piece, a multi-disciplinary, dance-based work that explores the impulse to report on calamity, the shimmer of attention to realms unseen, and the evidence of the body as possessing a will to let go of living.Emerging from a year in which David Neumann lost both his mother and father, I Understand Everything Better documents a process of dying, and how the altered attentiveness of the dying and those who care for them can invite a complex layering of now and then, here and there, living room and mountain road. The text draws on Neumann’s accounts of his father’s final days as well as Noh theater, the Kyogen play Boshibari, Shakespeare’s King Lear, transcripts of live weather reporting (mostly during hurricanes), and interviews with end-of-life caregivers, doctors, and meteorologists.Advanced Beginner Group’s 2015 production—winner of two Bessie awards for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Sound Design—includes text by David Neumann and Sibyl Kempson. Edited and designed by Karinne Keithley Syers with photography by Maria Baranova, this volume is an elegant, richly layered record of a rigorously collaged, collaborative performance that was itself a record of a storm.

A dark and irreverent monologue that explores what happens when all we believe in is shattered.

In the plays collected here--Ramp and Mushroom--Pulitzer Prize finalist Eisa Davis mingles modes of myth and speculation, documentary and fiction in two plays about family, desire, restorative justice, ecological sustainability, and immigration amongst the working class. Ramp adapts the foundational Egyption saga of Isis / Osiris and sets on a near-future airline ramp, where siblings Isis, Osiris, Seth, and Nepthys throw luggage on planes and bicker about our thorny, precipitate futurity: should change be fast or gradual? Can the ecological revolution we require for survival produce ease and peace if it's rooted in violence? Is the path to utopia brutal? Must it be? Mushroom centers on the lives, loves, and working conditions of the Mexican and Central American mushroom-pickers in and around the town of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, where over 40% of all the mushrooms we eat in this country come from. Through a series of intersecting narratives traversed by English, Spanish, K'iche' and Malayalam speakers, Mushroom considers a workplace dispute that has serious ramifications for multiple immigrant families, mapping how compassion and justice might intersect.

Commissioned by Abrons Arts Center and the Chocolate Factory Theater in New York and presented by the 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr & Perf. Co. in the winter of 2021.

Trained in classical piano and Marxism and raised on jazz, gospel, pop, hip hop, and Black revolutionary politics, Pulitzer Prize finalist Eisa Davis’s plays are marked by her stunning intimacy with the praxis of music alongside radical change. In Angela's Mixtape, time shifts like a mixtape, and like a mixtape, the play is both a memoir and a gift—for us, of course, and for Davis’s aunt, activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis, under whose tutelage Davis reads Das Kapital and learns to drive stick and hack her own way toward inheriting her legacy. In The History of Light, Davis counterpoints the intertwining fates of two couples under racialized pressures a generation apart. Lush with the sound of the grand piano, The History of Light is a study in black and white, love and alienation. Underlying the political clarity and formal virtuosity of Davis’s writing are the unexpected crackles of a voice warming up, the crunchiness of missed notes. Because for an artist concerned, like Davis, with how we become who we are and might be, error is a necessary instrument—maybe the sounding weight.

A continuation of Nature Theater of Oklahoma's investigation into transcription as epic theater.

The Javier Plays collects three plays by Chicago-based playwright Carlos Murillo.

Sibyl Kempson's Let Us Know Praise Susan Sontag is an irrational musical contemplation of collision of art and journalism.

A new play by Obie-award-winning playwright Erin Courtney.

In September 2021, playwright/performersEisa Davis and Jillian Walker met to discuss Walker's performance ritual, SKiNFoLK:An American Show (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in March 2022). InJanuary 2022, they met again to discuss Davis's installation performancepiece The Essentialisn't (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in2023). In these twin interviews about the uncanny ways their works mirroreach other, Davis and Walker take up questions of archive, memory, generationaltrauma, survivor's guilt, and the conundrum of performance given thecommodification and consumption of Black women's joy and pain. How toacknowledge, process, and heal the hurt that is felt? How to perform withoutbeing captured by others' ideas of what it means to be oneself?

A genre-bending work of meta-comedy by writer and performer Jess Barbarello.

A collection of interviews with New York theater artists who have spent their lives working in and inventing the avant-garde.