“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)
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)
