Collection Nineteen Scripts by Jack Smith (1 results)

Nineteen scripts and scenarios for theatrical performances and films in various stages of development, including notes on scenography, music, aesthetic musings and ravings, and illustrated with drawings and cartoons. Smith began his theatrical work in the mid-1960s and staged performances until shortly before his death in 1989. His work, of singular originality, heavily influenced experimental theater and performance art. As described by J. Hoberman in "The Theatre of Jack Smith," the works were frequently languid, with murky beginnings and endings, and a porous relationship between audience and performer. They were full of mishaps and delays; a prevailing sense of decay and imminent collapse; deadpan clowning; and the sense of spiraling private, inscrutable, and interminable ritual. Dan Isaac, reviewing a performance of Orchid Rot of Rented Lagoon, writes that "somewhere after midnight, the other members of the company. tried to get him to wind it up so they could all go home. But he only glared at them and yelled into the wings: 'If you have nothing to dodo it on stage!" The scripts presented here demonstrate Smith's wondrous argot and process of articulating his vision in a form that expand the genre and format of scenarios and scripts. Contemporaraneous accounts note that he would wield them at performances, barking out instructions to his cast, who in turn also often had scripts in hand while performing. Spanning the entirety of the period in which Smith staged theatre, the works represented in this collection include Hamlet and the 1001 Psychological Jingoleanisms of Prehistoric Landlordism of Rima-Puu, I Was A Male Yvonne DeCarlo for the Lucky Landlord Underground, Lobotomy in Lobsterland, Lobster Moon of Atlantis, Scaffolding of Icing A Horror Musical, Clash of the Brassiere Goddesses, Death of a Penguin, and several more. Significant gathering of largely unrecorded scripts providing substantial insight into the practice of one of America's most fugitive, influential, and under researched theatrical practitioners. Xerox and offset with holograph annotation. Near fine. Complete inventory available upon request.