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Eyes for Consuela
Eyes for Consuela
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Author: Sam Shepard, based on The Blue Bouquet by Octavio Paz Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Format: Softcover # of Pages: 49 Pub. Date: 1999 ISBN-10: 0822216787 ISBN-13: 9780822216780 Cast Size: 1 female, 3 male
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About the Play:
Eyes for Consuela is a full-length drama by Sam Shepard,
based on the unforgettable short story The Blue Bouquet by Mexican writer
and Nobel Prize-winner Octavio Paz. The play tells the story
of a lost soul, Henry, an American man who throws himself into the
Mexican jungle chasing the shadows, ghosts, and passions of his life. Eyes for Consuela takes you on a trip from the safe world of theatrical fourth walls to the unknowable, uncontrollable spirit realm.
In Eyes for Consuela, a dishevelled man wakes from a
sweat-drenching nightmare, furiously shaking his shirt and pants free
of possible small jungle creatures, and hastily dresses to face the
utterly dreamlike reality of remote Mexico, a torpid limbo. Henry is
a lost soul from the American middle-class, middle aged and unmoored,
a superfluous stranger to a wife he left hundreds of scattered miles
away in snowbound Michigan, and now alone in a squalid, vine-shrouded
"hotel" amid snakes, lizards and ghosts. The owner of the
makeshift inn, one-eyed Viejo, warns him to stay put for his own
safety, but on a brief, circular walk through the underbrush he is
set upon by a peasant named Amado. The predatory figure bears a
machete and a slender knife which he will use to cut the eyes from
Henry's head, he tells the incredulous American, in order to present
this penitent, macabre offering of "a bouquet of blue eyes"
to the bewitching Consuela. The fervour of Amado's obsessed mission,
his dizzying persuasiveness, and his menacing wit and insight, push
Henry's sanity to its limits. In a duel of ironic pathos, humour,
cruelty and metaphor, each man examines what has taken him from the
woman he loves and what desperate sacrificial price might reunite him
with her. At the point when the gracefully haunting Consuela appears
before Henry only to dismiss his brown eyes, the sole road out of the
tangled tropical forest seems indistinct but at last possible.
Eyes for Consuela premiered in 1998 at the Manhattan
Theatre Club, City Center Stage II, in New York City. Its European premiere was in in 2005 at the Donmar Warehouse in London. It has also been staged in several US cities.
Cast: 1 female, 3 male
What people say:
"One leaves Eyes thinking,
more than anything else, that [Sam Shepard's] plays are most
beautiful when they are angry." — New York Times
"The writing has the kind of
apparently effortless boldness that reminds you that you are in the
presence of one of the greatest living playwrights." — New
York Daily News
"…it is all about seeing and
not seeing, about various forms of blindness, physical, emotional,
existential. And about the sacrifices love entails. It is quirkily
unpredictable and laughingly unsettling." — New York
Magazine
"Shepard's writing is back at
its taut best, with the play's mystery unfolding a frisson of
theatrical immediacy…." — New York Post
Sam
Shepard (1943-2017) was an American playwright and actor. Born in
Illinois and raised in Southern California, he worked as a farmhand
and musician before moving to New York to begin his career as a
playwright. The celebrated author – who New York Magazine
called "the greatest American playwright of his generation"
– wrote more than forty plays, eleven of which have won Obie
Awards. His play Buried Child won the Pulitzer for drama. Two
other plays True West and Fool for Love were nominated
for the Pulitzers as well, and are frequently revived. As an actor he
appeared in more than thirty films, including an Oscar nominated
performance for his role as test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right
Stuff.
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Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard
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