Mr Universe and Other Plays
Collection Description
Jim Grimsley is the recipient of the George Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Playwright and Bryan Prize for Drama by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In this collection, he reveals his great gifts as a playwright in four powerful, award-winning plays presenting different worlds in collision and convergence. In MR UNIVERSE the rescue of a mute bodybuilder from the gritty streets of New Orleans by a couple of drag queens brings out the best and worst in them. In THE LIZARD OF TARSUS, an imprisoned Jesus (called J.) is interrogated by an ambitious follower, Paul of Tarsus. In THE BORDERLAND, neighboring families representing two very different social classes are brought together during a storm. And in MATH AND AFTERMATH, the two worlds of pornography and nuclear testing collide during a film shoot in the Marshall Islands.
Plays in This Collection
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
MR UNIVERSE
“… this play gets its hooks into you, [and] it won’t let go … [Grimsley’s] theatrical imagination is strange and captivating … You leave the play feeling you have walked in a daze through the ruins of a great myth you will never understand. The experience is bizarre — and haunting.” D J R Bruckner, The New York Times
THE LIZARD OF TARSUS
“Jim Grimsley’s play is so steeped in mysticism that he could be either a burning zealot or a hard-core atheist. In this speculative fable, a tourist’s casual remarks at a Jerusalem fruit market land him before the local authorities. His interrogator, Paul, insists that he was once personally acquainted with the man, J., leading the two to wage a battle for the truth — or at least the last word.” —Mary Shen Barnidge, Chicago Reader
BORDERLAND
“Rain pours down and thunder echoes throughout Jim Grimsley’s surreal suburban drama … Helen and Gordon Hammond, a successful, married couple who have moved from Atlanta to an out-of-the-way home, abutted by cornfields and trees — and, within view of their windows, a ‘shack,’ in Gordon’s words, a run-down house kept, barely, by a couple about whom they know very little and Gordon, at least, thinks of equally little. Helen’s persistence in standing in front of the bay windows — the spark for an argument that reveals how the couple’s happiness itself is a form of décor to match their lovely living room — permits her to spy a figure running across the field separating their home from their peculiar neighbors’; and when that figure turns up at their door, wet and bruised, the drama begins properly.” —Steve Shapiro, KC Metropolis (Kansas City)
Author(s)
Jim GrimsleyJim Grimsley is a playwright and novelist. Jim's first novel, Winter Birds, was published by Algonquin Books in 1994. The novel won the 1995 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and received a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Jim's second novel, Dream Boy, won the American Library Association GLBT Award for Literature (the Stonewall Prize) and was a Lambda finalist. His third novel, My Drowning, was released in January 1997 by Algonquin Books and for it he was named Georgia Author of the Year. His fourth novel, Comfort & Joy, was published in October, 1999, and was a Lambda finalist. A fantasy novel, Kirith Kirin, was published by Meisha Merlin Books in 2000 and won the Lambda in the science fiction and horror category for 2001. He has published short fiction in The Ontario Review and Asimov's and his stories have been anthologized in The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 16, Men on Men 4, Men on Men 2000, and Best Stories From the South, year 2001. Boulevard, published in 2002 by Algonquin, was again a Lambda finalist in the literature category and won Jim his second Georgia Author of the Year designation. His novel, The Ordinary, a science fiction novel published in 2004 by Tor Books, won a Lambda in the science fiction/fantasy/horror category. His latest two novels are The Last Green Tree, published by Tor Books of New York in 2006, and Forgiveness, published by the University of Texas Press as part of the inaugural James. A. Michener Fiction Series. His new story collection, Jesus Is Sending You This Message, was published in September 2008 by Alyson Books. Jim received the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Writers Award for his body of work in 1997, and has twice been a finalist for the Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2003 – 2004). In 2005 he won an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He served as playwright in residence at About Face Theatre in Chicago under a National Theatre Artist Residency Program grant from Theatre Communications Group/Pew Charitable Trust (1999-2004); he has been playwright in residence at 7Stages Theatre in Atlanta since 1986. In 1987 he received the George Oppenheimer/Newsday Award for Best New American Playwright for MR. UNIVERSE. His collection of plays, MR. UNIVERSE AND OTHER PLAYS, was published by Algonquin Books in 1998, and was a Lambda finalist for drama. His books have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Hebrew, and Japanese.
Special Notes
If original stage producers credits appear in bold below, all licensees are required to include them in the following form on the title page in all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all advertising in which the full cast appears in size of type not less than ten percent (10%) of the size of the title of the Play:
In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypub.com