“The likes of O‘Neill, Anderson, Rice, Miller, Wilder, Williams, Inge, Shepard, or Mamet? …how did such so sorry a gathering come
to collect -- how did we accumulate and sanction so questionable, if indeed not inadmissible a (dead) body of work? Here’s a quick list
for reconsideration…Rochelle Owens…Maria Irene Fornes…Jeff Weiss…Lanford Wilson…Julie Bovasso…Murray Mednick’s
plays. Anthony Ingrazzia’s "The Island", with not-for-profit theatre’s most successful every-syllable-fully-articulated-everybody-
talk-at-once (outdoor banquet) scene has vanished utterly, as also have Donald Brooks’s visionary hallucinations, "Xircus, the Private
Life of Jesus Christ" and "Infinity", and Harry Koutoukas’s "Tidy Passions", with off-off-Broadway’s unquestionably greatest single
line…
“Donald Brooks, whose life as actor, striptease artist, hustler, relapsed and reconverted Catholic, set designer, and director reads like
nothing so much as a chapter in the grand tradition of the Maudits, earned even less recognition as a playwright than Ingrazzia. In
Brooks’s "Xircus", set on the Deuce (42nd Street) and in the torment one knows it was lived, a pale chiffon and wire angel suddenly
flights a tightrope vaulted above the audience from atop a towering tenement on one side of the depraved, honking, drag to one on the
opposite side. I’d call it the enviable epiphanal moment in American theatre, were it not for an even more reduced, simultaneously
heartbreaking and transcendent half-minute in a later Brooks piece, "Showcase", in which a small cardboard cruise liner, its tiny dining
area lights blinking, crosses on the simplest of pulleys a Jersey dusk skyline shallow-depth backdrop not three yards wide. Worth
every Broadway play I’ve ever seen.”
Ronald Tavel, "Disputing the Canon of American Dramatic ‘Literature’" --New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 49, February 1997
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press)
to collect -- how did we accumulate and sanction so questionable, if indeed not inadmissible a (dead) body of work? Here’s a quick list
for reconsideration…Rochelle Owens…Maria Irene Fornes…Jeff Weiss…Lanford Wilson…Julie Bovasso…Murray Mednick’s
plays. Anthony Ingrazzia’s "The Island", with not-for-profit theatre’s most successful every-syllable-fully-articulated-everybody-
talk-at-once (outdoor banquet) scene has vanished utterly, as also have Donald Brooks’s visionary hallucinations, "Xircus, the Private
Life of Jesus Christ" and "Infinity", and Harry Koutoukas’s "Tidy Passions", with off-off-Broadway’s unquestionably greatest single
line…
“Donald Brooks, whose life as actor, striptease artist, hustler, relapsed and reconverted Catholic, set designer, and director reads like
nothing so much as a chapter in the grand tradition of the Maudits, earned even less recognition as a playwright than Ingrazzia. In
Brooks’s "Xircus", set on the Deuce (42nd Street) and in the torment one knows it was lived, a pale chiffon and wire angel suddenly
flights a tightrope vaulted above the audience from atop a towering tenement on one side of the depraved, honking, drag to one on the
opposite side. I’d call it the enviable epiphanal moment in American theatre, were it not for an even more reduced, simultaneously
heartbreaking and transcendent half-minute in a later Brooks piece, "Showcase", in which a small cardboard cruise liner, its tiny dining
area lights blinking, crosses on the simplest of pulleys a Jersey dusk skyline shallow-depth backdrop not three yards wide. Worth
every Broadway play I’ve ever seen.”
Ronald Tavel, "Disputing the Canon of American Dramatic ‘Literature’" --New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 49, February 1997
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press)