Three Plays by Deborah Meadows

A Los Angeles-based play, Guide Dogs rejects the triad of smog, traffic, and earthquakes for an exploration of reading and interpretation through civic unrest at city hall, the texts of LA figures (literary critic Marjorie Perloff and social critic Mike Davis), and the “Lightning Field” by Walter de Maria.

Some Cars, an embodiment, holds out against “the architecture of containment,” inflecting the hard surface of Kienholz’s art in a drive to uncover tragic action deferred through a small windshield, imperfectly.

Speech Acts with Trees is an inside-out Western that takes apart “narrow specializations with commanding views,” landscape tradition and conquest. Is a parable of sacrifice an obsolete railroad by the time conventional knowledge sets up shop in the “new” town? Are these Three Plays really one play along a topological fold?

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“Meadows brings a rare musicality to her writing for the stage, and her eye for the telling discontinuities of contemporary life animates these plays with vivid and unsettling tensions.”

—Guy Zimmerman, artistic director, Padua Playwrights

“Wry and observant, Deborah Meadows’ ambivalent oracles and philosopher-clowns seek “a nourishing shape that one could live in without tiring of its perimeter”, but find just as readily an anthroposcenic welter, marked by false flags and the untidy promise of myriad revolutions – each adjacent, reluctant, and imperfectly contained.”

—Andrew Maxwell, Poetic Research Bureau director, Candor is the Brightest Shield author

“A philosophical autopsy performed on the event horizon of a perpetually collapsing world made language. Painstaking yet abandoned, Meadows teases language to spill its secrets, cracking a harrowing case: this.”

—Juli Crockett, playwright, lead singer of the Evangenitals

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Deborah Meadows teaches as an Emeritus faculty member in the Liberal Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She lives with her husband in Los Angeles’ Arts District/Little Tokyo where she serves on the board of LARABA (Los Angeles River Artists’ and Business Association). She was nominated Los Angeles Poet Laureate in 2014.

Her recent collections of poetry are Translation, the bass accompaniment – Selected Poems (Shearsman Press, 2013), Saccade Patterns (BlazeVOX books, 2011), How, the means (Mindmade Books, 2010), Depleted Burden Down (Factory School, 2009), Goodbye Tissues (Shearsman Press, 2009). Other works of poetry include: involutia (Shearsman Press, UK, 2007), The Draped Universe (Belladonna Books, 2007), Thin Gloves (Green Integer, 2006), Representing Absence (Green Integer, 2004), Itinerant Men (Krupskaya, 2004), and two chapbooks, Growing Still (Tinfish Press, 2005) and “The 60’s and 70’s: from The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick” (Tinfish Press, 2003). Her Electronic Poetry Center author page is located: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/meadows/

Poetry Foundation site: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/deborah-meadows

Book Information:

· Paperback: 122 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-199-3

 

Three Plays by Deborah Meadows Book Preview