Drama. In this selection of plays, Jesse Glass's imagination rages, leaps and staggers from the Challenger disaster of 1986 to the hallucinated lucubrations of Thomas Holley Chivers (friend and rival of Edgar Allan Poe), and manages to cover the arrival of a cosmic, sexual vermiform lemure of the Kabbalistic Bohu-Tohu in a reportorial manner worthy of N.P.R., while ringing the changes on a young man's sexual angst in the face of the ambiguities of the Summerland. Visionary, gutteral, Artaudian, relentless, filled with the televised promise of a black and white yesterday and the anguished cry of tomorrow's prize-winning Flamenco singer, Glass's plays disengage, disencumber, debride, devour and deflower even while they detonate on the Senecan tongue in the midst of intoning. They scale their own Everests, plant their own flags, and play Stanley to the Livingstone of our burgeoning post-post-post-post-modernity.
Author City: Tokyo JAP
A native of Carroll County, Maryland, Jesse Glass now makes his home in Tokyo, where he teaches American literature and history at Meikai (Bright Sea) University. His books include LOST POET: FOUR PLAYS BY JESSE GLASS (BlazeVOX Books, 2010), Gaha Noas Zorge (New Sins Press, 2009), and THE PASSION OF PHINEAS GAGE & SELECTED POEMS (Ahadada Books/West House Books, 2006). Praised by Geraldine Monk, Jerome Rothenberg, Michael Heller, William Bronk, and other major voices of contemporary experimental poetry, Glass is an internationally acclaimed performer of his own work and features prominently at PennSound, Ubu Web, and in dozens of other anthologies and magazines devoted to "the sweet science." He is currently developing a puppetry and poetry theater with the aid of his students. Glass's literary manuscripts are archived in Special Collections at the University of Maryland Libraries, College Park and ten of his handmade, painted books are in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London.
“A rabid and venereal imagination...”
—Herbert Blau, author of Blooded Thought and The Impossible Theater
“‘The central, vital paradox of theater,’s wrote poet/playwright James Schevill, ‘is that it is both the most social and the most rebellious of the arts.’ The disunifying principle of these astonishing plays is collage—what Jerome Rothenberg called ‘the defining art form of the twentieth century.’ Jesse Glass understands that it is only in the play and collision of disparate elements that we may be led beyond ‘thought’ into thinking. These works, which the author calls ‘screams,’ are attempts—in the words of the ironically-named character, Faustus—to allow us to ‘walk unchained across the surface of the earth.’ Who but a poet would have thought to write a play that sends Edgar Allan Poe’s friend Thomas H. Chivers—Poe called him ‘one of the best and one of the worst poets in America’—up your spine! These ‘Four Plays’ are foreplay to what? To the pleasure of knowing something you didn’t know before, to the revelation of spirit amid the vast clatter of ‘history.’”
—Jack Foley
“Diminished by the unforgiving landscapes of hyperreal America, trapped inside the fantastical laboratory of one Edgar Allan Poe, outrageous, ultrasexual and blunt, Jesse Glass’s characters emerge from darkness like a procession of lost souls in a Fellini movie. A medium, a forgotten man, an aspiring poet, a little girl conserved in alcohol—one by one they detach themselves from the page, alive with the hope of a new world order, uncertain about the future—theirs, ours—waiting for a crash, a war, a revolution, anything that might remove them from the eternal present of their discontent. Reminiscent of Beckett’s tramps, Pinter’s intruders and Edward Bond’s violent offenders, Glass’s characters face us unapologetically, bleeding from the head, engaged in battles with demons of their own making—memorable, angry, raw.”
—Dayana Stetco