53rd state press us (44 résultats)

Paperback. Etat : New. In a roving, shimmering conversation that took place in May 2021, scholar, poet, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs and playwright, songwriter, performance artist, and educator Daniel Alexander Jones discuss love as a foundational principle of artistic practice and societal change. Reflecting on Love Like Light, Daniel Alexander Jones's collection of seven plays and performance texts (published by 53rd State in July 2021), DAJ and APG illuminate the ways in which an attention to care, community, nuance, invitation, perceptual particularities, and embodied conditions can resist the profoundly extractive context in which life is lived and art is made. As they discuss the work of Audre Lorde, Billie Holiday, Beah Richards, Bayard Rustin, and Malcolm X, as well as that of DAJ's grandma Daisy Mae and APG's grandmother, aunt, and niece, DAJ and APG propose that love, like light, suffuses everything, and that love, like light, creates a field in which transformation, justice, healing, and radical beauty are not just possible-they are already, now.…

Paperback. Etat : New. In June 2022, Sharon Bridgforth and Daniel Alexander Jones held an intimate and searching conversation about the pragmatics of making art and engaging the communities--living and ancestral--from which their work emerges. The two longtime friends reflect on Bridgforth's bull-jean and dem/dey back, a collection of two performance/novels written twenty-two years apart about the eponymous bull-jean (published in Sept 2022 by 53rd State Press). Bridgforth reveals how motherhood spurred her towards understanding her genders and sexuality, and how the desire to love, heal, and live in truth has compelled her writing and her life choices. Bridgforth details the weave between her early work in social justice (based in Austin, TX, where she and Jones met), her artmaking, and her remarkable commitment to community. Bridgforth's writing starts in the marrow of her own healing. As they discuss Bridgforth's work--as well as the work of such luminaries as Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley, Ntozake Shange, Urban Bush Women, raúlrsalinas, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland--Jones and Bridgforth offer tested strategies for living a grounded artistic life.…

Paperback. Etat : New. Dark, disturbing, deft, irreverent, and revelatory, Ignacio Lopez's monologue is at once a coming-of-age story, a horror story, and a highly theatrical experiment in radical empathy. Weaving together two very different voices grappling with strikingly similar crises of sexuality and conscience, Severed asks: where do we draw the line between human and monster, severing, as we do so, the possibility of empathy, forgiveness, and understanding? What happens when we see ourselves reflected in the monster's eye.…

Paperback. Etat : New. SKiNFoLK: An American Show by Jillian Walker Is a quilted ritual of liberation, bearing witness to the playwright-performer's identity, heritage and legacy as a Black woman in this America. This ancestor-revering epic collides with blues, jazz, neosoul, pop, rock, and spiritual Black legacies. What will you see in the archive? Who will you meet? What is down at the root? What color is the sky, again.…

Paperback. Etat : New. SKiNFoLK: An American Show by Jillian Walker Is a quilted ritual of liberation, bearing witness to the playwright-performer's identity, heritage and legacy as a Black woman in this America. This ancestor-revering epic collides with blues, jazz, neosoul, pop, rock, and spiritual Black legacies. What will you see in the archive? Who will you meet? What is down at the root? What color is the sky, again.…

Paperback. Etat : New. Context, Synecdoche, Homonym, and Polyseme live in a house laden with clutter, but Etymology keeps bringing new deliveries for Context: a blank book, a conversation with the dentist, a key. Homonym and Polyseme sort and rearrange; they send what they can to the cloud (via helium balloon); occasionally they smuggle out old things, lost for years, and new things they know Context will never need. Synecdoche tries to hold it all together and sings. Meanwhile, Context wonders whether listening is work-if it is labor, if it matters, and if what matters (if it matters) can be retrieved from the ever-accumulating material of living. meronymy is a kaleidoscopic, audiovisual performance-portrait of the technologies, ancient and modern, by which we cling to what we might otherwise forget. With wry tenderness and formal dexterity, Jendrzejewski builds a space in which to reckon with memory, loss, intrusion, and overflow amidst the cacophonic practice of living in language together.…

Paperback. Etat : New. By combining literary and dramatic narrative with eye-witness accounts of Sasquatch encounters culled from the internet, The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S. reinvents as many versions of the Frankenstein author Mary Shelley as there are definitions of the word "Gothic." In this work, a string of financial, maternal, and familial misfortunes causes Shelley-referred to in this production as Maery S.-to spawn a monstrous creative expression, which takes on its own life and violent history. Maery cannot help but fall  in love with her Monster, only to see it "collected" and imprisoned by charitable funding at a mandatory artists' residency.…

Paperback. Etat : New. 1534: John of Leyden proclaims himself the Favorite of Heaven, runs naked through the streets of Munster, Germany, and forms a society free of laws or private property. 1976: John Lydon proclaims himself an "antichrist," helps launch a movement to "destroy passersby," and permanently changes popular culture. Coincidence? In Lana Lesley's graphic adaptation of the Rude Mechs' stage adaptation of Greil Marcus's text, Dr. Narrator and the Sex Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren recount an alternative history of the 20th century via the Sex Pistols, the Cabaret Voltaire, the May '68 riots, and a handful of medieval heretics. Lipstick Traces is a graphically gritty and intellectually nervy rendition of a theatrically irreverent and physically ecstatic production of a history of "movements in culture that raised no monuments.movements that barely left a trace.".…

Paperback. Etat : New. The second episode finishes the musical portion of Nature Theater of Oklahoma's epic tale generated from the single simple question, asked of a friend: "Can you tell me your life story?" The Life and Times cycle enjoyed a widely acclaimed run in New York's Under the Radar Festival in January 2013, produced by Soho Rep, New York City.…

Paperback. Etat : New. Parts three and four of Nature Theater of Oklahoma's grand theatrical presentation of an unremarkable life, of which Charles Isherwood of the New York Times wrote, "Entrancing, maddening, heartbreaking, sidesplitting, even, in its humble way, awe-inspiring.An ambitious, brilliantly executed production from one of the most innovative theater companies in New York.". …

Paperback. Etat : New. bull-jean and dem/dey back collects two performance/novels centering Sharon Bridgforth's southern-Black-butch-sheroe, bull-jean.First published by RedBone Press in 1998, the Lambda Literary Award-winning the bull-jean stories chronicles the course of lovve returning in the Life-times of bull-dog-jean. Set in the rural 1920s south, the bull-jean stories is an act of griot-anthropology, remembering the ancestor we never knew but always knew we needed-the raucous, sweet-talking, heart-aching wo'mn-lovvn-wo'mn bull-dog-jean and the fierce and beautiful community that surrounds her.Twenty-two years later, bull-dog-jean returns in bull-jean/we wake. Grieving the loss of their elders, seeking healing, the Narrator calls forward bull-jean. Through a series of dreams, porch prayers, and visitations from cussing conjurers, Black Mermaids, children that fly, and shape-shifting ole folk, bull-jean and dem guide the Narrator towards a realization of the sustaining power of love, memory, community, ritual, and spiritual binding.…

Paperback. Etat : New. This is the first collection of plays by OBIE award winning Tina Satter, described as a "rising experimental star" by the New York Times and named a 2011 Off-Off Broadway Innovator to Watch by Time Out New York. Seagull (Thinking of You) is a personal look at performance, failure and attempted love -- ultimately an unexpected meditation on why we ever try to say something out loud. This volume includes the plays Family, named a Top 10 show of 2009 by Time Out New York and Away Uniform. …

Paperback. Etat : New. Continues Nature Theater's investigation into transcription as epic theater. Zachary Oberzan's exhaustive retelling of David Morrell's First Blood unfurls along a vein of spectacular psychic charge. Simultaneously giving John Rambo's life Homeric form, performing Oberzan's own relationship to the book, and anticipating his planned solo remake of the movie, Rambo Solo obliterates distinctions between the ridiculous and the redemptive.…

Paperback. Etat : New. A play meant to challenge our normalized expectations of cause and effect, to suggest post-logical incoherence as the basis of human motivation, feeling, and violence, and to threaten our Aristotelian/Stanislavskian conceptions of contemporary American theater and identity as we safely understand it. Contains impossibly expensive stage directions and early Bruce Springsteen songs.…

Paperback. Etat : New. "In the Bright Future, the environmental rampage will have ended, amnesty will be given to all those who return to their senses, and it will be said, 'We are not free yet, but we are on our way!'" On an asterism situated between two constellations in a universe not far from this one, a motley assortment of well-meaning but ineffectual people-who have been psychically kidnapped-train and prepare for the Bright Future, an almost-utopia they will eventually be deployed to enact back on planet Earth. Part boot-camp space-travel memoir, part how-to manual for the construction of a paradise, The People's Republic of Valerie, Living Room Edition is an attempt to transform feelings of despair, grief, and rage into something of value, into positive action, into something of beauty that might uplift and create space and occasion for imagination and community.…

Paperback. Etat : New. Ann and Mary Ann are married. They are both neuroscientists and they both witnessed deeply traumatic events when they were young. Now, in the carefully ordered worlds of their marriage and laboratory-which is linked like the two lobes of the brain-Ann and Mary Ann care for, protect, and reflect one another. But when Ann begins to study Fran, a tile artist who is unable to recognize her husband after he commits an unthinkably violent act, Ann and Mary Ann must reckon with what it really means to see and be present to another person. Ann, Fran, Mary Ann is a deeply reflective, reflecting, refracting play about trauma, God, patterns, and the way they live in our bodies, our minds, and acts of love. …

Paperback. Etat : New. David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group's I Understand Everything Better is a "deeply felt and deeply moving" (New York Times) performance piece, a multi-disciplinary, dance-based work that explores the impulse to report on calamity, the shimmer of attention to realms unseen, and the evidence of the body as possessing a will to let go of living.Emerging from a year in which David Neumann lost both his mother and father, I Understand Everything Better documents a process of dying, and how the altered attentiveness of the dying and those who care for them can invite a complex layering of now and then, here and there, living room and mountain road. The text draws on Neumann's accounts of his father's final days as well as Noh theater, the Kyogen play Boshibari, Shakespeare's King Lear, transcripts of live weather reporting (mostly during hurricanes), and interviews with end-of-life caregivers, doctors, and meteorologists.Advanced Beginner Group's 2015 production-winner of two Bessie awards for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Sound Design-includes text by David Neumann and Sibyl Kempson. Edited and designed by Karinne Keithley Syers with photography by Maria Baranova, this volume is an elegant, richly layered record of a rigorously collaged, collaborative performance that was itself a record of a storm. …

Paperback. Etat : New. Bilingual edition in English and Russian, with illustrations. "For those of you still in the market for a New Year's resolution, here's a manageable one: Get yourself to.see Kristen Kosmas's new play, There There. I can't think of a better way to start the theatergoing year than with this language-drenched, resonant knockout." - New York Times "A tour de force of a verbal marathon." - Seattle Times There There is a wildly unpredictable text about being the completely wrong person in the totally wrong place at the exact wrong time doing all the most wrong things, written by one of theater's great poets of failure and surprise, Kristen Kosmas. Christopher Walken, on tour in Russia with a solo show inspired by everyone's favorite Chekhovian sociopath, mysteriously falls off the ladder and is unable to perform. Karen, who apparently proofread the script once, is asked to go on in Walken's place. A precarious bilingual performance duet ensues between Karen and her Russian interpreter, Leo. This volume includes both the Russian and the English text.…

Paperback. Etat : New. This book collects three plays and one manifesto by writer-director Julia Jarcho, including American Treasure, Dreamless Land, and Grimly Handsome, winner of a 2013 Obie award for Best New American Play.

Paperback. Etat : New. Collecting Daniel Alexander Jones's plays and performance texts Bel Canto, Black Light, Blood:Shock:Boogie, clayangels, Duat, Phoenix Fabrik, and The Book of Daniel, this volume offers a panoramic view of Jones's shifting, glimmering, transformational body of work. Each play a provocation to the possibility of a more just world with love as civic practice at its center, Jones's writing moves with lithe and associative grace through histories personal, political, cosmological, and sublime. A reunion not only of Jones's revolutionary work in the course of twenty-five years in the avant-gardes of New York, Austin, and Minneapolis, among others, Love Like Light is also a reunion of collaborators and friends, featuring essays by Vicky Boone, Jacques Colimon, Eisa Davis, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, korde arrington tuttle, Aaron Landsman, Deborah Paredez, and Shay Youngblood and an interview with Faye Price.Awarded the 2021 PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for his expansive, multidisciplinary, radical body of work, Jones has, in the words of judges Jeremy O. Harris, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Leigh Silverman, "continued perfecting a dramaturgy all his own based in the traditions of Africana studies, performance studies, queer theory, and mysticism, challenging established traditions while creating space for audiences to ponder what theater is and who it is for."A companion volume, Particle and Wave, features a book-length conversation between Daniel Alexander Jones and poet, scholar, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Love Like Light and the way that love, like light, suffuses everything and is the condition and power of change in the world.…

Paperback. Etat : New. This volume includes The Mayor of Baltimore and its companion piece Anthem from Kristen Kosmas, whose writing invents its poetry from the blunt, the found, and the discarded. A coterie of friends and strangers gather to celebrate a modest electoral victory. Oblique poetry alternates with the syncopated clatter of small talk. A brokenhearted refrain of disappointment underscores, and a tiny aria of self-revelation hangs in the empty space after the guests leave.…

Paperback. Etat : New. In a roving, shimmering conversation that took place in May 2021, scholar, poet, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs and playwright, songwriter, performance artist, and educator Daniel Alexander Jones discuss love as a foundational principle of artistic practice and societal change. Reflecting on Love Like Light, Daniel Alexander Jones's collection of seven plays and performance texts (published by 53rd State in July 2021), DAJ and APG illuminate the ways in which an attention to care, community, nuance, invitation, perceptual particularities, and embodied conditions can resist the profoundly extractive context in which life is lived and art is made. As they discuss the work of Audre Lorde, Billie Holiday, Beah Richards, Bayard Rustin, and Malcolm X, as well as that of DAJ's grandma Daisy Mae and APG's grandmother, aunt, and niece, DAJ and APG propose that love, like light, suffuses everything, and that love, like light, creates a field in which transformation, justice, healing, and radical beauty are not just possible-they are already, now.…

Paperback. Etat : New. In June 2022, Sharon Bridgforth and Daniel Alexander Jones held an intimate and searching conversation about the pragmatics of making art and engaging the communities--living and ancestral--from which their work emerges. The two longtime friends reflect on Bridgforth's bull-jean and dem/dey back, a collection of two performance/novels written twenty-two years apart about the eponymous bull-jean (published in Sept 2022 by 53rd State Press). Bridgforth reveals how motherhood spurred her towards understanding her genders and sexuality, and how the desire to love, heal, and live in truth has compelled her writing and her life choices. Bridgforth details the weave between her early work in social justice (based in Austin, TX, where she and Jones met), her artmaking, and her remarkable commitment to community. Bridgforth's writing starts in the marrow of her own healing. As they discuss Bridgforth's work--as well as the work of such luminaries as Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley, Ntozake Shange, Urban Bush Women, raúlrsalinas, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland--Jones and Bridgforth offer tested strategies for living a grounded artistic life.…

Paperback. Etat : New. Dark, disturbing, deft, irreverent, and revelatory, Ignacio Lopez's monologue is at once a coming-of-age story, a horror story, and a highly theatrical experiment in radical empathy. Weaving together two very different voices grappling with strikingly similar crises of sexuality and conscience, Severed asks: where do we draw the line between human and monster, severing, as we do so, the possibility of empathy, forgiveness, and understanding? What happens when we see ourselves reflected in the monster's eye.…

Paperback. Etat : New. SKiNFoLK: An American Show by Jillian Walker Is a quilted ritual of liberation, bearing witness to the playwright-performer's identity, heritage and legacy as a Black woman in this America. This ancestor-revering epic collides with blues, jazz, neosoul, pop, rock, and spiritual Black legacies. What will you see in the archive? Who will you meet? What is down at the root? What color is the sky, again.…

Paperback. Etat : New. Parts three and four of Nature Theater of Oklahoma's grand theatrical presentation of an unremarkable life, of which Charles Isherwood of the New York Times wrote, "Entrancing, maddening, heartbreaking, sidesplitting, even, in its humble way, awe-inspiring.An ambitious, brilliantly executed production from one of the most innovative theater companies in New York.". …

Paperback. Etat : New. The second episode finishes the musical portion of Nature Theater of Oklahoma's epic tale generated from the single simple question, asked of a friend: "Can you tell me your life story?" The Life and Times cycle enjoyed a widely acclaimed run in New York's Under the Radar Festival in January 2013, produced by Soho Rep, New York City.…

Paperback. Etat : New. A play meant to challenge our normalized expectations of cause and effect, to suggest post-logical incoherence as the basis of human motivation, feeling, and violence, and to threaten our Aristotelian/Stanislavskian conceptions of contemporary American theater and identity as we safely understand it. Contains impossibly expensive stage directions and early Bruce Springsteen songs.…

Paperback. Etat : New. Continues Nature Theater's investigation into transcription as epic theater. Zachary Oberzan's exhaustive retelling of David Morrell's First Blood unfurls along a vein of spectacular psychic charge. Simultaneously giving John Rambo's life Homeric form, performing Oberzan's own relationship to the book, and anticipating his planned solo remake of the movie, Rambo Solo obliterates distinctions between the ridiculous and the redemptive.…

Paperback. Etat : New. Chicago-based playwright Carlos Murillo's The Javier Plays is an inventive and epic trilogy that delves into themes of authenticity, truth, and self-made mythology. This collection includes the plays Diagram of a Paper Airplane, A Thick Description of Harry Smith (Volume 1), and Your Name Will Follow You Home. …