Maple and Vine & Other Plays

Description

Known for his ability to turn an unusual premise into something profound and sublime, Jordan Harrison is one of our most inventive and thought-provoking contemporary playwrights. His work grapples with the fleeting nature of time, the fallibility of memory, the volatility of identity, and our often fraught relationships with technology. This new collection gathers together several of his plays, including the title play, Maple and Vine, which follows a couple who decides to forgo their urban lives in favor of recreating the "simpler" lifestyle of the 1950s, trading cell phones for Tupperware parties in a newfound quest for happiness. This volume also contains the plays The Amateurs, Amazons and Their Men, and Doris to Darlene.

Jordan Harrison grew up on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle. His plays include Maple and Vine, The Grown-Up, Doris to Darlene, Amazons and Their Men, Finn in the Underworld, Act a Lady, Kid-Simple and Futura. Harrison is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, the Kesselring Prize, and the Horton Foote Prize, among other awards. He was a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Marjorie Prime. A graduate of the Brown MFA program, Harrison is a writer-producer for the Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black.

Filled with dazzling wordplay, archaic vocabulary, and odd malapropisms, the theatrical worlds of Jordan Harrison lift language off the page and into three-dimensional space, creating a universe that is surreal and sublime, brainy and beautiful--and wholly his own.-- "Brooklyn Rail" Jordan Harrison racks up beaucoup points for originality... [A] darkly appealing fairy tale.--Marilyn Stasio "Variety on Maple and Vine" Sharply drawn and funny.--Charles Isherwood "The New York Times on Maple and Vine" Thrilling, expansive, world-changing.-- "New York Times on The Amateurs" Doris to Darlene is that rare thing: a rarefied theatrical experiment that has the glow of pure entertainment and the warmth of a folktale.-- "Newsday on Doris to Darlene" The life of Leni Riefenstahl... has been examined and critiqued aplenty, but rarely so entertainingly as in Amazons and Their Men, a brash play by Jordan Harrison.-- "New York Times on Amazons and Their Men"