The play that made its debut as the greatest cause celebre in modern drama, The Beard is a bold and poetic work about two mythic figures in American culture—Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid.

“Almost as if two ghosts from two periods of the American past were speaking across decades to each other, and yet at the same time are present in our living room undressing themselves or speaking to us of the nature of seduction, the nature of attraction, [...read more...]

Michael McClure’s Josephine: The Mouse Singer, a play in verse, is based on a story of Franz Kafka’s, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” Kafka and McClure? And yet the combination is bound to work, for in essence both writers in their different ways ponder the trials of the artist in an arbitrary universe. McClure’s exuberant, inspired adaptation, in fact, reminds us of the bizarre whimseys Kafka’s tales were originally intended to be.

The first New York production [...read more...]

Readers of Michael McClure’s play Gorf may be reminded of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, even if dancing TV sets and the “Middle American” protagonists Mert and Gert bring the surreal effect down to native ground. On another level, Gorf is a ritual of regeneration, or, if you like, a kind of spiritualized Hellzapoppiin. The “murdered” Mert and Gert and reborn in the search for their child, the Shitfer, who disintegrated when “hurled through Time and Space,” is resurrected [...read more...]

The plays in this book were written during the same period as DARK BROWN and in the same manner — THE BLOSSOM was written spontaneously after “three days of careful preparation”. Together they form the catalyst for later work — the first use of grahhr language in THE FEAST and the involvement with Billy the Kid in THE BLOSSOM.

Read as poetry (“projective verse turned to theater”) these dramas, in the same way as DARK BROWN, explode the traditional separation [...read more...]

Michael McClure, San Francisco poet, novelist and playwright, has created a new form, the “Gargoyle Cartoon”—a short, mad, whimsical, funny, incisive one-act play. This series of eleven plays includes Spider Rabbit, The Meatball, Apple Glove, The Cherub, The Authentic Radio Life of Bruce Connner and Snoutburbler, and six others. John Wasserman, in the San Francisco Chronicle, says McClure is “doing to words what avant-garde musicians are doing to melody.” The characters are creatures: ogres, [...read more...]

“Michael McClure’s The Beard is a mysterious piece of work, for while its surface seems simple, repetitive and obscene, there is an action working which is dramatic and comic at once, and the play emits an odd but intense field of attention…” —Norman Mailer, (from his Introduction)

“The Beard is a milestone in the history of heterosexual art.” —Kenneth Tynan

“…juicy & exuberant…” —Allen Ginsberg

“The dialogue throughout makes ‘Virginia Woolf’ almost a Sunday school recitation by comparison. [...read more...]