The Playgoer: Plays & Playwrights 2008

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Monday, March 17, 2008

Plays & Playwrights 2008

"After they close, too many plays are denied that chance to make new fans. Without a permanent record, they evaporate, and we are robbed of something before we realize we have it. That's why this book is so important."

Amen, Mark Blankenship--writing the above words in his foreward to the new Plays & Playwrights annual anthology of recent Off-Off plays. Martin Denton (of NYtheatre.com) thankfully continues to provide this service of publishing plays of merit (albeit openly subjectively chosen by Denton) that might have run just one week and never were reviewed by the Times.

I myself missed most of this year's selections: Crystal Skillman's The Telling Trilogy, Daniel Talbott's What Happened When, Carolyn Raship's Antartica, Thomas Bradshaw's Cleansed, Aobert Attenweiler's ...And We All Wore Leather Pants, Leslie Bramm's Marvelous Shrine, Elena Hartwell's In Our Name. So I'm delighted to get to catch up. Especially with Cleansed since I always end up missing Bradshaw's work, even though it has sparked some of the liveliest responses, pro and con.

I did see three of the selections: Daniel Reitz's Fall Forward, which I liked; John Regis' Linnea, which I didn't. And blogger Mac Roger's Universal Robots--which I admired but may be too much of a Karel Kapek purist to appreciate Rogers' riffs on the famous RUR. Still, all are worth reading, and maybe I'll even discover I was too harsh on Linnea. Maybe.

So click on the Amazon link to your right and buy a copy, damn it! Or else you're condemning Off-Off Broadway to eternal ephemera.

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