Overview

"Volume 1 of My Collected Plays by award winning author Lazarre Seymour Simckes, who has taught at Harvard, Yale, Williams, Vassar, Bennington, Tufts, and Brandeis, and conducted nationally televised writing workshops, contains his first four plays: Seven Days of Mourning, Ten Best Martyrs of the Year, Nossig's Antics, and Open Rehearsal. The critical acclaim for these plays has hailed them as ""fascinating, unforgettable, funny, wild, compassionate, unique, strange, outrageous, mythic, enlivened by an almost hysterical inventiveness; a different kind of theater, one that leaves much to interpretation and imagination, intelligent and witty and frequently moving."""

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9781792376931

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Reviews

Seven Days of Mourning A fascinating play, unforgettable, funny, wild, compassionate, unique. It still haunts me. -- Clive Barnes, N.Y. Times Extraordinary, a black requiem for man's happiness, and a haunting human tragedy. -- Ray Stricker, WKCR A very good play, perhaps a great one. Its profession of ecstasy and salvation could help to recover an ancient theater of magic and wonder. -- Dan Isaac, The New LeaderTen Best Martyrs of the Year Extraordinarily strange, mythic, enlivened by an almost hysterical inventiveness. -- Michael Smith, Village VoiceNossig's Antics A riveting puzzle. -- Richard McBee, The Jewish Press Simckes brilliantly blends Nossig-nothing-Nazi, so that all sound the same. This blending binds all the images of the play together, as if Simckes has forged a stage of completely random props and dialogue, but in grand Francis Bacon style, his smudge finds an order in the chaos that must have been there all along. - Menachem WeckerOpen Rehearsal A different kind of theater, one that leaves much to interpretation and imagination. -- Angelina Tatara, Metro Lazarre Seymour Simckes' Open Rehearsal has an outrageous premise and an even more outrageous twist on that. It is intelligent and witty and frequently moving! -- Edward Albee I have known his work from its beginnings. Whether it takes the form of fiction or drama, its central theme is the changes an ordering morality rings upon people in the throes of attempting to understand the world around them and themselves. What makes the work unique is that the evangelist of that morality is as eccentric as he is compassionate. And he enters the lives of the characters with a kind of drastic glee which creates a dramatic action alternately faceted with heartbreaking and hilarious moments in which their spirits pulse like a flame taking purchase on the dead wood of their feelings. That action is plotted with a Euripidean precision as irresistibly compelling as the joy, awe and fellow-feeling it embodies.His is the kind of unique talent which the Japanese honor as a national asset. -- William Alfred

Author Information

"Lazarre Seymour Simckes, playwright, novelist, psychotherapist, and translator from the Hebrew, has taught at Harvard, Yale, Williams, Vassar, Brandeis and Tufts, as well as at Bar-Ilan and Haifa University in Israel.A graduate of Harvard College (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa), Stanford University (Wallace Stegner Writing Fellow, M.A.), and Harvard University (Ph.D.), Simckes has conducted live, interactive writing workshops via television linking middle school and high school students across the country. During his Fulbright year at Haifa University, he conducted a writing workshop (""Celebrating Differences"") linking Israeli Arab and Jewish high school students with their American counterparts via satellite.He has received numerous awards: a Littauer Foundation Playwriting Grant, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant, a National Jewish Book Award for his translation from the Hebrew of Nava Semel's novel ""Becoming Gershona,"" and a Literature Award from the National Endowment of the Arts for his original screenplay ""The Human Windmill"" which was a finalist at the Beverly Hills Film Festival of 2018. His film work includes a commission from the director Sidney Lumet for an adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis's novel ""The Last Temptation of Christ.""As a practicing psychotherapist, Simckes has worked with multi-problem families and incarcerated sex-offenders."

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