Eric Overmyer: Collected Plays (Contemporary Playwrights) - Softcover

Overmyer, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1880399334 ISBN 13: 9781880399330

Publisher: Smith & Kraus Pub Inc, 1993

Synopsis

Theatre cannot compete with film and television as a popular art form. If it is not to go the way of other antique, hand-made arts and become completely esoteric, it must re-discover its authenticity. As Chiaramonte says in Theatre in Utopia, theatre is not elitist, but it is for those who love it. I hope these plays are authentically theatrical, written in a real and new American, and I hope those who love theatre will find some pleasure here. - Eric Overmyer, Preface

About this title

About the Author

Eric Overmyer is the recipient of grants and fellowships from McKnight, the NEA, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Le Comte du Nouy Foundation. He has written extensively for film and television and is the author of a play for radio, Kafka's Radio, produced by WNYC. He lives in New York and New Orleans, making a living in Los Angeles, and is married to actress Ellen McElduff.

Reviews

Eric Overmyer's plays overflow with words, and joyously so. Unrestrained by naturalism, his characters turn directly to the audience in a charged, heightened style that hangs somewhere between theater and poetry. Overmyer's work takes on a surreal, dreamlike quality that is uniquely tailored to each of the distinctive worlds he creates. In On the Verge , he sets us down in terra incognita in the company of three 19th-century female explorers who find themselves bushwhacking their way through the jungle of time, heading toward the future. En route, they encounter Cool Whip, "I Like Ike" buttons and the ghosts of husbands they have left behind. In The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin & Louis Chauvin , a haunting portrayal of a declining and delirious Scott Joplin, the musician cannot escape the specters of his past--a lost wife, a dead child, the fame that slipped away as the popularity of ragtime ebbed. In a Pig's Valise , his musical sendup of 1940s film noir complete with flashbacks, voiceovers and underscoring, follows private eye James Taxi, whose encounter with ethnic folk-dancer Dolores Con Leche throws him up against the notorious Bucket brothers and into the realm of stolen dreams. In print, Overmyer's plays are an entertaining and provocative read.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Smith & Kraus Pub Inc
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1880399334
• ISBN 13: 9781880399330
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336