Six Plays

“Mr. Linney continues to be one of our most perceptive chroniclers of the folkways of rural America, finding humanity and nobility in the most remote of places.” –Mel Gussow, New York Times

“Linney’s words do it all, summoning up vistas of scary beauty and passions of elemental force.” –David Richards,Washington Post

“His output was dazzling in its variety and exceptional for its depth as well as its breadth of scope. Goering at Nuremberg, Lord Byron’s daughter, the Washington novels of Henry Adams: Life, literature, and history were all his materials, not to be milled down into iconic emptiness, but to be explored for the values they might carry…One of America’s best playwrights.” –Michael Feingold, Village Voice

Romulus Linney is one of American drama’s best-kept secrets. Uniquely adept at capturing the idiomatic poetry of his native South, he maneuvers with equal grace through the vernacular of New York’s contemporary intelligentsia and the voices of a wide range of historical figures.

In Childe Byron, the dying daughter of the notorious Lord Byron conjures a confrontation with the father she never knew. In 2, Linney scrutinizes Hitler’s infamous second-in-command, Hermann Goering, behind the scenes at the Nuremberg trials. Tennessee celebrates the indomitability of early Appalachian mountain settlers, while Heathen Valley reveals the same region’s citizens’ subsequent search for faith. In FM, an authentic genius stumbles into the creative writing course of a small Alabama college. Set among SoHo literati, April Snow is a compassionate study of a world-weary screenwriter.

Endowed with Linney’s lyric intensity, augmented by his rich sense of humor, the six plays in this volume illuminate a major talent of the American Theatre.

Romulus Linney (1930-2011) is the author of 3 novels as well as 13 full-length plays and 22 short plays, which have been produced in theatres across the U.S. and Europe. He received National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; Guggenheim, Rockefeller and National Foundation for the Arts grants; and an Obie award. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, he was a member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Fellowship of Southern Writers.