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The play takes place in an urban
apartment where Ed and Tom are constructing a set of
bookshelves. After Tom and his wife quarrel and splatter
each other with paint, Mom and Pop arrive, declaring
that fourteen hundred thousand books wait outside ready
to be walked up the apartment's eight flights of stairs.
Farcical behaviors and absurdist exchanges carry the
first half of the play. The work however concludes with
an enigmatic discussion on civic planning and social
engineering: Mom and Pop hypothesize about "Elevated
cities suspended under vacuum air" and "vertical cities
stretching north through Canada and south through
Mexico." At its end, the play essentially asks: Is
"community" possible? [Source: Sam Shepard and the
American Theatre] |
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One-act play.
Summer of 1966. Commissioned by
National Educational Television to shoot three plays of
their own choosing, LaMama recorded "Pavane" in a
studio, "The Recluse" and "Fourteen Hundred Thousand" on
location in "found" buildings on Welface Island and Park
Avenue. Broadcast in the fall of 1966 as "Three from
LaMama" and re-aired on June 22, 1969. Teleplay cast
included Joe Chaikin and Joyce Aaron.
Performed at the Firehouse Theatre by
the auspices of the Office of Aid to Drama Research at
the University of Minnesota in 1966.
Directed by Sydney Schubert Walter with Steve Friedman,
Antoinette Maher, Raymond Henry Stadum, Greta Giving and
David Burns.. |
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Five Plays:
Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1967
Faber and Faber, London, 1969
The Unseen Hand and
Other Plays:
Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1967
Chicago and other Plays:
Applause Theater Book Publishers, 1981
Urizen Books, NY, 1981
Faber and Faber, London, 1982
Continuum, NY, 1983
Fifteen One-act Plays, Vintage, 2012
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