Schenkar Joan M - Signs of Life: Six Comedies of Menace

CABIN FEVER

This riveting comedy of menace features three malevolent oldsters sitting on a country porch in an imaginary New England, reciting horrifyingly funny stories about the customs of their nearest neighbors.

The real world of the play is the familiar haunted by the unknown, parody colliding into cartoon, as if an antic Samuel Beckett has allowed himself to be kidnapped by a gloomily playful Charles Addams.

Village Voice

A compellingly ambiguous static drama, at times suggesting an allegory of a society gone sour on itself or a spiteful game played by malevolent gods atop some Appalachian Olympus.

Los Angeles Times

Cabin Fever has been produced around the globe.

SIGNS OF LIFE

Signs of Life is a bizarre and elegantly witty drawing room comedy presenting eminent Victoriansactual and fictitiousas they perform their lives and experiment on their loved ones. The novelist Henry James rifles the imagination of his powerful sister Alice, who stages public fits, keeps a private journal, and has a female lover who prefers Henry dead; the drunken impresario P. T. Barnum exhibits his miraculous Elephant Woman, Jane Merrit, who is too like Alice James for anyones comfort; and the suave and sinister Dr. Sloper is far too interested in the scientific possibilities of the bodies of both ladies.

At the center of the play is a mad tea party at which Dr. Sloper and Henry James continually toast the health of the ladieswho meet only in the mens stories of them.

An original drama on a provocative theme, advanced in an elegant and literate voiceWhat more can anybody ask from a new play?

New York Post

A true gemfull of surgical imagery and brilliant giggly horridness.

Village Voice

Signs of Life is one of the most widely produced experimental comedies of its kind.

FULFILLING KOCHS POSTULATE

In this internationally acclaimed dark comedy, cooking and death, art and science are served up in wonderfully delectable forms in both the kitchen and the laboratory. Kochs Postulate features Typhoid Mary as the live-in chef of Dr. Koch, the scientist who identifies the bacillus she spreads so liberally through her cooking. In its up-to-the-minute, comic book, Katzenjammer style, Kochs Postulate balances the beauties of art and the dangers of science in a murderously funny comedy of cooking and eating for four unforgettable characters.

darkly hilarious and brilliantly creepy.

Village Voice

Schenkar is an original: her narrative drive springs from menace.

Time Out (London)

THE LAST OF HITLER

In this brilliant and timely comedy of menace, a post-war Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun are trapped in a Jewish retirement community in Florida, surrounded by the people they so recently tried to exterminate. This dazzling language-opera is staged as a 1940s radio broadcast complete with announcers, commercials for Rinso-Blue, and a How to Cook a Kosher Chicken showin which much more than the kosher chicken is cooked. It features singing and dancing Russian nurses, Edgar Bergen-Charlie MacCarthy routines with a talking skeleton, the psychoanalysis of Adolf Hitler by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, and a radio appearance by the Dionne Quintuplets.

THE UNIVERSAL WOLF

The Universal Wolf, one of the most-produced comedies in colleges and little theaters for the last two years, is the quintessential send-up of both the Little Red Riding Hood tale and modern French criticism. Featuring the Wolf as a French Structuralist, Grandmother as a retired butcher with a very good cutting arm, Little Red Riding Hood as the insufferable brat everyone wants to eat, and a role for the Audience, The Universal Wolf delivers a side-splitting comedy for four characters that has delighted theatergoers across the country and around the world.

BURNING DESIRES

An entirely new and fiercely comedic reinvention of the story of Joan of Arc: this time Joan is a teenager in 1950s Seattle, where its far too wet to burn her. She drives a Triumph convertible, goes on the warpath with a fabulous Native American Princess, and is advised by those mid-twentieth-century icons, Saint Marlene Dietrich, Saint Gertrude Stein, Saint Emily Bronte, and Saint Emily Dickinson. Featuring mad doctors, bad girl and boy scouts, and a teen-aged Gilles de Raix, Burning Desires is a wonderfully rollicking and literate comedy for all ages.

SIGNS OF LIFE

Wesleyan University Press
Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755
Collection copyright 1998 by Joan M. Schenkar
Introduction copyright 1998 by Vivian Patraka
CABIN FEVER copyright 1980, 1984 by Joan M. Schenkar
SIGNS OF LIFE copyright 1979, 1980 by Joan M. Schenkar
FULFILLING KOCHS POSTULATE copyright 1985 by Joan Schenkar
THE LAST OF HITLER copyright 1982 by J. M. Schenkar, revised J. M. Schenkar
THE UNIVERSAL WOLF copyright 1993 by J. M. Schenkar
BURNING DESIRES copyright 1995 by J. M. Schenkar

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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CIP data appear at the end of the book

All the plays in SIGNS OF LIFE are subject to a royalty payment. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, electronic reproduction or transmission, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are strictly reserved. In their present form, the plays are dedicated to the reading public only.

For permission to stage CABIN FEVER, SIGNS OF LIFE, FULFILLING KOCHS POSTULATE, THE LAST OF HITLER, THE UNIVERSAL WOLF, and BURNING DESIRES, write to Samuel French, Inc., at 45 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10011.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders of the photographs reproduced in this book. The author would be grateful to hear from anyone who might have escaped detection.

is for Maureen, Marlene, Maurice, and Sara

responsible, as usual, for everything.

FAMILY PRIDE IN THE 50s (Photo by Sylvia Plachy)

Left to Right: RICKY, DAVID, LOUIS, DOROTHY, JOAN, MARLENE, MAURIE, MAUREEN . Theatre for the New City production, 1987, directed by Liz Diamond.

JOAN : Thats right. Thats right we are related. And its totally the worst kind of relation. Its blood relation, (Spooky Tone) You know what I mean. Theres one big vein that runs down this dinner table and one big heart in the kitchen pumping the blood through all that same vein. And the knife that cuts one, cuts all.

a vicious new version of Little Red Riding Hood

a very new vision of Joan of Arc

At This Performance

Joan M. Schenkar

Writing is a life sentence to solitude. Writing for theatre is a life sentence to standing on a stage with your skirt up over your head. Between utter seclusion and total exposure, I have tried to locate an even more extreme position: the theatricalization of feelings so complex that the only way to access them is laughter. I cannot forget that The Last Laugh is always (literally) on us. After the flesh is gone, every skeleton sports a persistent smile.