Principia Scriptoriae with Between East and West
Collection Description
This collection includes two full-length plays: PRINCIPIA SCRIPTORIAE and BETWEEN EAST AND WEST. In PRINCIPIA SCRIPTORIAE, two young writers meet in prison under an unnamed right-wing Latin American regime. Fifteen years later they find themselves on opposite sides of a conference table. BETWEEN EAST AND WEST portrays a middle-aged Czech émigré couple struggling to adapt to a new country.
Plays in This Collection
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
Press Quotes
PRINCIPIA SCRIPTORIAE
“… PRINCIPIA SCRIPTORIAE, a powerful and intelligent new play by the American Richard Nelson, which explores the brutal and bloodied relationships between politics and art, and between literature and life in a Latin American country fifteen years ago and today …” —Michael Ratcliffe, The Sunday Observer
“Modern American plays rarely confront public issues head-on: Indeed, after a year in New York, a colleague came home muttering darkly about the prevalence of what he termed ‘diaper-drama.’ But Richard Nelson’s rich and stimulating PRINCIPIA SCRIPTORIAE — now at The Pit (The Royal Shakespeare Company) after playing at the Manhattan Theater Club this April — is a genuine play of ideas. It deals with the fate of the writer under left- and right-wing regimes, with the complex motivation behind creation, and indeed with the abiding consolation of literature itself …” —Michael Billington, The Guardian
BETWEEN EAST AND WEST
“The title of Richard Nelson’s unsettling new play is deliberately misleading. East-West politics do, however, provide the backdrop and premise of the play: It concerns the experience of a Czech couple forced for political reasons to emigrate to New York. The problems they face in exile, Nelson suggests, have as much to do with the residual gap between America and Europe as with that between East and West. But the focus is on the conflict between Gregor and Erna, the two exiles, themselves. In his careful study of their relationship, Nelson reminds us that power and freedom cannot be understood in purely political terms.” —Sally Laird, Times Literary Supplement
“Its subject is homesickness: that love which cannot bear to speak its name because it’s more private than any other emotion. The setting is a one-room flat in New York, but the real setting is the no-man’s land between the home they lost and the one they’ll never really find … I liked this painful, moving, compassionate play; I liked the way it stated its point obliquely, but with a hard, unsentimental edge. I liked its wise humor, and its shrewd sense of what it’s like to be middle-aged, uprooted, resentful, determined, and difficult.” —John Peter, London Sunday Times