In a futuristic city, one man tells it like he sees it Hungry Mother! He's the DJ with a strong pulse but a weak signal. He riffs on the truth with verbal virtuosity, with primal passion, with ambidextrous dexterity, with a sexy scream ... but when his visions begin to manifest themselves in sinister ways, is he being played by darker forces? Or are his words creating a dangerous truth?

Native Speech

Literature & Fiction

Eric Overmyer

Dramas & Plays

Broadway Play Publishing

Eric Overmyer's cosmic comedy probes the world of international conspiracy, political paranoia, and intergalactic connections.

In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe

Broadway Play Pub

A richly atmospheric, riveting noir peopled with lowdown characters who raise double and triple-crossing to high art. "Eric Overmyer [is] one of this nation's most accomplished and vividly imaginative playwrights." -Wayne Johnson, The Seattle Times "In NATIVE SPEECH, ON THE VERGE and IN PERPETUITY THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE, Eric Overmyer manifested a extraordinary command over the tools of language: sound, syntax and image ... In DARK RAPTURE, which premiered at Seattle's Empty Space Theater in May, Overmyer's verbal dexterity is acute as ever, but this time it's harnessed to a plot delivered by characters who seem driven by purposes of their own. It's by far Overmyer's most satisfying play. DARK RAPTURE may not, however, earn its author the critical praise it deserves - it certainly didn't in Seattle - because it adheres so strictly to the rules of the genre. In the written arts, in film, in dance, in pop music, a creative artist's submission to such rules earns no disrespect. In theater, it seems we honor work created within rigid conventions only if the conventions are someone else's: kabuki or kathakali, wayang or noh. DARK RAPTURE is 'noir,' the genre which crystallized in the 1940s novels and screenplays of Raymond Chandler and has intermittently borne fruit ever since in the hands of artists as various as Richard Condon and Wim Wenders. Good noir is rare on stage ... But his DARK RAPTURE is the most successful stage essay in the form since Len Jenkins's marvelous, poetic FIVE OF US. Like many noir fictions, DARK RAPTURE is about escape: from the self, from the sane, from the ordinary. This time the escape hatch is offered by a fire that leaves the Berkeley Hills home of Ray and Julia Gaines a pile of smoldering rubble with a charred and unrecognizable corpse beneath it. Whose corpse is it: Ray's, or a looter's? Just where was Julia when the house burned down? And what happened to the brown-paper parcel Julia says she left in Ray's custody? Did it go up in flames, too, with or without him? Any number of sinister people want to know. In classic noir manner, the story advances tableau by moody tableau from Baja bedroom to Key West bar deck to Tampa kitchenette, each offering its sharply etched character cameo, its fragment of information, its new complication, straight to a conclusion redolent with irony ..." -Roger Downey, American Theater

Dark Rapture

A version of Ibsen's PEER GYNT set in the Pacific Northwest and points south, drawn freehand and writ large

Alki

Overmyer, Eric

Henrik, Ibsen

Broadway Play Publishing, Incorporated

A comical, anachronistic, and witty retelling of the Greek myth, composed "after Kleist by way of Moliere with a little bit of Giraudoux." "The story of Jupiter's cuckolding of Amphitryon has come in a variety of theatrical styles over the centuries. Plautus, by all accounts, had great success with it as a burlesque for the Romans; Moliere turned it into a farce, of course; Kleist made a romance of it; and Giraudoux fashioned it into a fantasy. In the new version, Mr Overmyer seems to aim for the sophistication of a Saturday Night Live skit, a sort of Classics Comics for the theater." -Wilborn Hampton, The New York Times"

Amphitryon

this collection contains three full-length plays: DARK RAPTURE, IN PERPETUITY THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE, &amp; ON THE VERGE

Plays By Eric Overmyer

Wordplays Three (PAJ Books)

Wordplays 3: An Anthology of New American Drama

Arts & Photography

Adrienne Kennedy

JANE MARTIN

Lee Breuer

Richard Lees

Murray Mednick

Walter M. Kendrick

Performing Arts

Paj Pubn

PAJ Publications

Eric Overmyer: Collected Plays (Contemporary Playwrights)

Theatre cannot compete with film and television as a popular art form. If it is not to go the way of other antique, hand-made arts and become completely esoteric, it must re-discover its authenticity. As Chiaramonte says in Theatre in Utopia, theatre is not elitist, but it is for those who love it. I hope these plays are authentically theatrical, written in a real and new American, and I hope those who love theatre will find some pleasure here. - Eric Overmyer, Preface

Smith & Kraus

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Books by Eric Overmyer