Cellophane: Plays (PAJ Books)

About this book

Celebrated for his dizzying linguistic inventions his experimental narratives his biting social and political critiques and his absurdist sense of humor Mac Wellman has become one of Americas leading avant-garde playwrights. In Cellophane Wellman offers the eleven plays that he considers his most important: Albanian Softshoe Mister Original Bugg Cleveland Bad Penny Cellophane Three Americanisms Fnu Lnu Girl Gone Hypatia The Sandalwood Box and Cats-Paw. Written between 1983 and 1998 they showcase Wellmans on-going exploration of the limits of language and the consequences of humanity in the postmodern world. "These plays " Wellman writes "are about the heroism ordinary people must employ every day to keep on functioning with any certainty with any pleasure or satisfaction in an order of Being that has become unknowable remote a context of at best theoretical plausibility." Also included in this volume is his acclaimed essay on the theater "A Chrestomathy of 22 Answers to 22 Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater."