Bøger udgivet af Serpent Club Press

"There's no such thing as a simple desire."

Socrates' whole life was a dedication to doubt, to the act of questioning and of never fully admitting something as a final, definitive end. Above all, this meant that Socrates always maintained the slightest hint of separation from all things.

An anthology of new writing by humans who write and write well.

In "Minotaur" a family gathers on Christmas Eve. Like all families, this family holds itself together with lies, illusions, cliches. Over the course of a night and day, those lies, illusions, cliches begin to break down under the pressure of repressed truth. This is the basic meaning of the play's title: at the center of every labyrinth, there is a monster (a monster which takes many shapes, including our own).The play is about truth: truth as the overhearing of ourselves, through the encounter with other people; encountering other people, and ourselves, in other people. Letting all the pieces collide against each other, and then being able to--finally--see a sort of pattern in the fast chaotic images.

In a word: tragedy--the art of reckoning with fate. Which is what By Morning is about: the grief that comes with having a fate. Circumstances that cannot be avoided or ignored. Family, history, violence, love. Three brothers on the nights of their parents' funeral: reckoning with the unrepaired past.

From the author: "Theater is uniquely alive and at-risk in every moment; or it can be -- if the elements are right. It is uniquely alive in the way that quotidian life is not necessarily alive and at-risk. It is necessary medicine. An ancient medicine. A ritual of self-realization. World literature has produced only a handful of great plays; there is far less first-rate drama than there is poetry or prose. It is a unique and absolutely challenging form: theater demands the crystallization of the way we -- whoever we are at any given point in space time- live, think, breath, feel. Ardor, whether it succeeds or doesn't, is ontologically and linguistically ambitious: it attempts to put pressure on our own sense of ourselves not as beings in the world, but as beings who use language to define the world they live in. More prosaically: Ardor is about us, but it is also open to re-interpretation in the future. I didn't want to write a play that will be useless in ten years: this is not a blog article about young people or contemporary art -- it's about the chaos that underlies human nature; a chaos that can be painted with different colors and associations."

When the sweeping force of poetry runs into the wall of one family's incommunicability, something has to give way. Or, at least, such is the premise of Denmark, an ensemble play by Matthew Gasda. Beginning with the autumnally-fading love affair of an ardent young woman and a much older writer, the play quickly reveals its deeper themes: honesty, faithfulness, the impossibility of hiding ourselves, all the ways we still try to do so as the young woman's family descends upon their beach house and discovers the relationship. No silence remains untouched, no secret can be kept guarded, as this mood of lyrical confrontation impregnates every other relationship as well: husband and wife, parent and child, sister and brother, an individual towards themselves. By the end, the single room in which the play is set almost feels like a confessional, but one in which the words and rituals for expressing pain seem to be lacking, a yet-to-be consecrated space in which penance and love may only ever be hinted at or longed for.

"I know that I don't want to live the life of an efficiency-obsessed Millennial technocrat who never sleeps, never cries; who manages their life through an assisted-living network of IPhone apps. I want to create a work-and thus: a life-that creates room for suffering and transcendence; but I also know that THE work-the work which I feel the immanence of-cannot be wished into existence; I know that I must submerge myself utterly in the water of art for it to be realized."

SUNY Oswego Theater Department has commissioned rising young NYC playwright Matthew Gasda to re-conceive and write a new translation/adaptation of THE BACCHAE by Euripides for the contemporary stage.

A discursive, brilliant, and surprisingly moving essay, simply, on why the bicycle ought be our primary method of getting from place to place.

A remarkable lyrical collaboration on two seasons, autumn and spring, in poetry and prose.

May 1, 2012, 11PM: a day of conspiracy between politics and nature. Today Occupy Wall Street held demonstrations in most of the public parks in Manhattan and Brooklyn. From the moment I left my apartment in the morning, to when I returned in the evening, I felt I was being stalked by every good and evil intention in the world, my body pushed along by a rogue wind. It was the finest weather I had seen in New York City in months. The city's conscience seemed to be stirring out of its torpid winter sleep at last. I saw thousands of seagulls flocking up the Hudson from New York Harbor, forming a wall of white plumage from Battery Park to Chelsea. The trees in Madison Square exploded-overnight, it seemed- with pink and lavender blossoms, the second wave of flowers in as many weeks. New Yorkers of every imaginable costume turned out for the rallies in Wall Street, Washington Square, Central Park. It was one of those days when the whole island of Manhattan, above and below ground, agreed, as if by silent contract, to gather its millions of incommensurable fragments into a single critical mass, which, though it lacked a central nucleus, articulated, nevertheless, the immensity of its cohesion.