Dark Ride and Other Plays (Sun & Moon Classics)

One of the most important young voices in American drama, Len Jenkin is well known in the New York theater scene. But although his plays have been performed at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and the Magic Theater in San Francisco, it is only recently he has begun receiving the national attention he deserves.
This new collection of plays is, in part, an attempt to promote that national recognition.
American Notes is anthologized in this new volume along with Jenkin's Dark Ride, My Uncle Sam, Limbo Tales, and Poor Folk's Pleasure.

Playwright Jenkin (Kitty Hawk, The Life and Death of Jesse James) serves up five plays that delve, as the title suggests, into the darker regions of life. In "Limbo Tales," the themes of disconnection and despair are explored by characters who try to read their world as they would a road map, unaware that the "best map of the world was the world itself--so the job was done." In "Dark Ride," ancient texts would seem to shed light on the present, but few can translate them, and even fewer can, in the larger sense, read them. These characters run from the past, yet are just as wary of the future in a "world of coincidence." Not exactly Godot territory, but close. The first publication of the American Theater in Literature program, this collection bodes well for the rest of the series. Brian McCombie