Len Jenkin's Theatre: Wonder and Heart

152 Pages·2010·0.54 MB·English

by  Robert Andreach

Len Jenkin’s Theatre
Wonder and Heart
Robert J. Andreach
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA, ® INC.
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ISBN: 978-0-7618-5323-7 (paperback : alk. paper)
eISBN: 978-0-7618-5324-4
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For Kevin, Jason, and Thelma; George and Elaine;
and Jim (in memoriam) and Mary
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Gogol and Kid Twist 1
1 Limbo Tales, Dark Ride, My Uncle Sam, and
Poor Folk’s Pleasure 19
2 American Notes, New Jerusalem, Five of Us,
and Careless Love 52
3 A Country Doctor, Like I Say, and Pilgrims of the Night 89
Conclusion: Kraken and Margo Veil 123
Index 137
v
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Akadémiai Kiadó for permission to reprint, in rewritten form,
Robert J. Andreach, “The Grail Quest: Providing Entrance to Len Jenkin’s
Theatre,” Neohelicon 36.1 (2009) 167-77, © Akadémiai Kiadó, and William
S. Doxey for permission to reprint, in rewritten form, Robert J. Andreach,
“Reimagining Hermes in Len Jenkin’s Five of Us,” Notes on Contemporary
Literature 39.2 (2009) 4-6, © William S. Doxey.
I also wish to thank two former colleagues, Professors John Greene and
John Stibravy, for sharing resources.
Finally, I wish to thank Ms. Patty Shannon of The Wordstation, Avon,
New Jersey, for preparing the manuscript; Ms. Joanne P. Foeller of Timely
Publication Services, Hamburg, New York, for preparing the index; and Mr.
Brian DeRocco of University Press of America for guiding the manuscript
through the production process.
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Introduction
Gogol and Kid Twist
In a 1990 article in the New York Times, theatre critic Mel Gussow called
attention to a new emphasis on the American stage. The title of the article
is “Playwrights Who Put Words at Center Stage,” and its opening words
are “Language is reaffirming itself in the American theater.”1 Among the
playwrights cited is Len Jenkin, productions of whose plays Gussow was
reviewing in the 1980s. About the same time, Paul C. Castagno was attend-
ing a conference on new directions in playwriting with Jenkin one of four
featured playwrights whose works constituted a new approach to the craft.
The approach so engaged Castagno’s imagination that it became the subject
of his 2001 book, New Playwriting Strategies, the “basic premise” of which is
“that playwriting is language based.”2 A few years later in an article entitled
“Experimental Drama at the End of the Century,” Ehren Fordyce cited four
playwrights who deserve mention as a group—Mac Wellman, Jenkin, Jeffrey
M. Jones, and Eric Overmyer—because of their “interest in exploring the
depth and range of the American vernacular.”3 Yet there is no book-length
study of Jenkin’s theatre or those of the other group members for that mat-
ter, despite their garnering awards; their plays being produced in the United
States and other countries, though in non-mainstream venues; and their ap-
proach’s spawning a second generation of language-based playwrights.
Primarily a classroom text with exercises in the strategies, Castagno’s book
is not a study of Jenkin’s theatre. My book is, the result of writing about his
plays (and Overmyer’s and Wellman’s) for some time. It takes its inspira-
tion from three sources, in addition to being a spectator at productions and
hearing the poetically textured scripts performed. My first encounter with
Jenkin’s theatre in published form is the first source. In 1988 Broadway Play
Publishing came out with a collection of seven different plays with the seven
playwrights asked to contribute statements gathered together as afterwords to
1
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