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)
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