About the Play:

Four Short Plays is a collection of one-act plays by Lanford Wilson. The playwright helped to advance the Off-Off-Broadway theatre movement with his earliest plays, which were first produced on an eight foot by eight foot stage at the now legendary Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village beginning in 1964.

Days Ahead portrays the fraught psyche of a fastidious little man who reveals his own bizarre surprise as he confronts the memory of an early love, which he perceives as a dusty, crumbling wall through which he must dig. (Premiered in 1964 at Caffe Cino; Cast: 1 male)

The Madness of Lady Bright is considered one of the very first in the gay theatre movement, as well as one of the catalysts for the highly experimental off-off Broadway explosion of the 1960s. It's a hot evening in her New York City apartment, as aging drag queen Leslie Bright peers into her mirror and is faced with her own mortality, while being haunted by the memories of those who she has loved and lost. The theatrical work is one of the first to examine the experience of a queer person in a truly human light – not through lenses that coloured queer people as mentally ill or as deviants – but as human beings. (Premiered in May 1964 at the Caffe Cino, was his first major success, and has appeared in revivals to the present day; 1 female, 2 male)

This Is The Rill Speaking: A Play for Voices, is a poetic, mosaic-style evocation of small-town life told through multiple voices which shift and blend from identity to identity. (Premiered in 1965 at Caffe Cino; Cast: 3 female, 3 male)

Say De Kooning pits an artist and two female lovers against the very strains of modern life they hoped to escape by summering at the beach. Not even there, though, can they avoid the pitfalls of their own demanding personalities. (Premiered in 1987 at Sanford Meisner Theatre; Cast: 2 female, 1 male)

What people say:

"… the most interesting new American playwright since Albee." — New Statesman

About the Playwright:

Lanford Wilson (1937-2011) was one of the most distinguished American playwrights of the late 20th century. He was instrumental in drawing attention to Off-Off Broadway, where his first works were staged in the mid-1960s. He was also among the first playwrights to move from that milieu to renown on wider stages, ascending to Off Broadway, and then to Broadway, within a decade of his arrival in New York. His work has also long been a staple of regional theatres throughout the United States. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame, and in 2004 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.