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    Plays for The Public
    Plays for The Public
    Plays for The Public
    Ebook113 pages38 minutes

    Plays for The Public

    By Michael W. Kirst

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    About this ebook

    “There’s an irresistible joy to reading these plays…examining them at leisure without the urgent propulsive forward movement of the theater, reveals beauties and resonances uniquely literary.” —Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director, The Public Theater, from his foreword

    Plays for The Public includes:

    The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (AKA Lumberjack Messiah)

    “Richard Foreman is the ultimate theater auteur and mind-roiling warlock of avant-garde drama… Gods is an extravaganza of tightly orchestrated hallucinogenic visual effects, bruising slapstick and intense, cryptic lines… It is majestically mad and funny.” —New York Times

    Idiot Savant

    “Vintage Foreman: ravishing, perplexing, scary, a sensual and intellectual message for those weary of causality and psychology.” —Time Out New York

    Old-Fashioned Prostitutes

    “What makes Mr. Foreman’s work so entertaining is his ability to turn these classic, head-scratching concerns into phantasmagorical vaudevilles in which all the world’s a stage that keeps changing shape on you… Mr. Foreman is a grandmaster.” —New York Times

    This volume features the two plays sumptuously produced at The Public Theater in New York City that mark the culmination of Richard Foreman’s unstintingly inventive, astonishing career in theater, just as he was beginning to devote his creative energies entirely to filmmaking.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTheatre Communications Group
    Release dateFeb 11, 2020
    ISBN9781559368759
    Plays for The Public
    Author

    Michael W. Kirst

    Richard Bark Foreman (b. 1779), according to genealogical sources, was born to a Scottish American Indian trader and a Cherokee mother.

    Read more from Michael W. Kirst

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      Book preview

      Plays for The Public - Michael W. Kirst

      Old-Fashioned Prostitutes:

      A True Romance

      PRODUCTION HISTORY

      Old-Fashioned Prostitutes: A True Romance. Co-produced by the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (Richard Foreman, Founding Artistic Director; Mimi Johnson, Managing Director) and The Public Theater (Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director; Patrick Willingham, Executive Director). Presented at The Public Theater, New York City. April 30–June 2, 2013. Written, directed and designed by Richard Foreman.

      A large paneled room with banquette.

      GABRIELLA: Número One.

      (All enter. Alfredo goes to mirror, shines it.)

      VOICE: End of play.

      ALFREDO: OK. When looking into a mirror

      What one sees—goddammit.

      GABRIELLA: Is this true?

      Why does one feel

      one is falling towards the center

      of the earth?

      ALFREDO: Like this. (Falls)

      GABRIELLA: The entire earth—

      I force myself to say that.

      SUZIE: No no no and no.

      ALFREDO: Oh yes, I now say.

      SAMUEL: During my leisurely promenade

      Through the dark streets

      of the city of the dead and the almost

      dead

      It comes to my mind …

      But perhaps, ladies and gentlemen,

      it is best never to speak openly about

      such things.

      But it did happen

      That traveling these streets

      in bright sunlight

      An old man with white hair

      Shabbily dressed, trudging slowly

      in the direction opposite to the one

      in which I was traveling

      carrying a large, soiled cardboard box

      holding what personal belongings

      I could not guess

      But—whispered hoarsely under his breath

      Go to Berkeley, make film.

      I did not respond.

      But I frowned

      And a few seconds later

      turned to watch him proceed, slowly

      down the street.

      (Girls giggle.)

      Later in the day

      Lying on the bed in my hotel room

      I wondered—

      SUZIE AND GABRIELLA: Ooo …

      SAMUEL: I wondered should I have approached him

      to ask for clarification.

      Was he speaking to me

      or to himself?

      —yet it seemed appropriate to my concerns—

      And my possible

      Future.

      GABRIELLA: Go to Berkeley, my friend,

      make film.

      SUZIE: Well, why not?

      GABRIELLA: Which could have meant, not the city in sundrenched California—

      SUZIE: But possibly the long-dead Irish philosopher of idealism, Bishop George Berkeley—

      GABRIELLA: Oooo

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