Overview

"Volume 2 of Lazarre Simckes's ""My Collected Plays"" contains four plays, three of which are historical fantasies, but the fourth, ""The Wonderchild,"" is a naturalistic play about a divorcing couple who fight over the custody of their seven-year-old son, though the dramatic action lends itself to a spirit of farce. Farce also invades the world of the three history plays. ""The Impeachment of James Madison"" puts the president, now in his eighties, on trial for impeachment; prosecuted in P. T. Barnum's circus by Madison's former slave, Paul Jennings. ""Soldier Boys"" places us in early 19th century Russia during the reign of Czar Nicholas I, when he issued an edict drafting Jews into the Russian army for the first time, including children as young as twelve. Unfortunately, a five-year-old boy, Itsik, gets snatched from his mother's arms by kidnappers to meet the quota of recruits for their town. The desperate mother, Kalah, barges into the palace to demand that Czar Nicholas release her son, whereupon he instantly falls in love with her. ""Minutes"" presents the encounter of Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1910 for a psychoanalytic session dealing with Mahler's mental collapse over his wife Alma's infidelity. But the analysis is constantly beleaguered by the waiter at the cafe where Freud and Mahler initially meet and by the members of a future Freud-Mahler Society visiting Leiden to recreate the encounter that took place years earlier."

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The Wonderchild is a naturalistically funny, sardonically sad and comically outrageous work. Yet the nature of madness and its domestic effects, a major theme of the play, lends itself to a spirit of farce and grotesqueness. Thinking about it, as I have for a week now, there seems plenty of directorial opportunities for comic invention. But the pace is straight and direct, not self-indulgent. Lots of possible things to do on stage yet everything is verbally rich, Simckes in control of his words.My main point is this: it's genuinely entertaining theater. It became a story of people I wanted to know about, especially because they were so clear yet complicated in conception. The play has stayed with me. It seems to me to be a winner. Frederick Willey Simckes's plays always exhibit a unique flavor of absurdism rooted in the Jewish experience. Jonathan Slaff His is the kind of unique talent that the Japanese honor as a national asset. William Alfred

"""The Wonderchild is a naturalistically funny, sardonically sad and comically outrageous work. Yet the nature of madness and its domestic effects, a major theme of the play, lends itself to a spirit of farce and grotesqueness. Thinking about it, as I have for a week now, there seems plenty of directorial opportunities for comic invention. But the pace is straight and direct, not self-indulgent. Lots of possible things to do on stage yet everything is verbally rich, Simckes in control of his words.My main point is this: it's genuinely entertaining theater. It became a story of people I wanted to know about, especially because they were so clear yet complicated in conception. The play has stayed with me. It seems to me to be a winner."" Frederick Willey ""Simckes's plays always exhibit a unique flavor of absurdism rooted in the Jewish experience."" Jonathan Slaff ""His is the kind of unique talent that the Japanese honor as a national asset."" William Alfred"

Author Information

Lazarre Seymour Simckes, playwright, novelist, psychotherapist, and translator from the Hebrew, is a graduate of Harvard College, Stanford University and Harvard University. His first play, Seven Days of Mourning, was staged at Circle in the Square, New York. Clive Barnes cited the play's quality of fascination, of wild exaggeration, declaring it spiky, uncomfortable and yet intensely moving. Unique, wild, funny.He has taught writing at Harvard, Yale, Williams, Vassar, Brandeis, Tufts, and abroad as a Fulbright Visiting Writer at Haifa University in Israel and the University of Tampere in Finland. Recently he taught at Bar-Ilan University (Israel).Simckes is the recipient of a National Jewish Book Award for his translation from the Hebrew of the novel Becoming Gershona by Nava Semel, an Ingram Merill Foundation Grant, a Littauer Foundation Playwriting Grant, and two awards from the National Endowment of the Arts. As a practicing psychotherapist he has worked with multi-problem families, couples, individuals, groups, and incarcerated convicts.

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