Cellophane: Plays

Celebrated for his dizzying linguistic inventions, his experimental narratives, his biting social and political critiques, and his absurdist sense of humor, Mac Wellman has become one of America's leading avant-garde playwrights. In Cellophane, Wellman offers the eleven plays that he considers his most important: Albanian Softshoe, Mister Original Bugg, Cleveland, Bad Penny, Cellophane, Three Americanisms, Fnu Lnu, Girl Gone, Hypatia, The Sandalwood Box, and Cat's-Paw. Written between 1983 and 1998, they showcase Wellman's on-going exploration of the limits of language and the consequences of humanity in the postmodern world. "These plays," Wellman writes, "are about the heroism ordinary people must employ every day to keep on functioning with any certainty, with any pleasure or satisfaction, in an order of Being that has become unknowable, remote, a context of at best theoretical plausibility." Also included in this volume is his acclaimed essay on the theater, "A Chrestomathy of 22 Answers to 22 Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater."