WELLER, Michael [Alan Schneider].
Cancer.
London: Faber & Faber , 1971.
$975.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152243
+$500
First Edition of Cancer; Inscribed by Michael Weller to Alan Schneider, Director of the American Premiere
First British edition of Michael Weller's celebrated comic play of the 1960s generation, produced in America under the title Moonchildren. Octavo, original publisher's pictorial wrappers. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper to the director Alan Schneider, "For Alan, ...if we just change the title and cut that bit where...and change scene 5 & 6 and...and write a different ending and... Mike Weller. 17.7.72." The recipient, Alan Schneider, directed the American premiere of Moonchildren at the Arena Stage in Washington in November 1971 and the Broadway production that followed at the Royale Theatre in February 1972. Schneider was among the foremost American directors of his generation and the great champion of the postwar stage in the United States. He directed the American premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1956 and remained Beckett's preferred American director, staged the United States premieres of Harold Pinter's plays from the 1962 off-Broadway double bill of The Dumb Waiter and The Collection through the Broadway premiere of The Birthday Party in 1967, and won the 1963 Tony Award for Best Direction for the original production of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In very good condition. An exceptional association copy uniting the playwright and the director of the American premiere.
Cancer (1971), subsequently retitled Moonchildren for its American premiere and all subsequent productions, is the seminal early play by Michael Weller (born 1942), the Brooklyn-based playwright and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter whose works for the stage include Loose Ends, Fishing, and Spoils of War, and whose film credits encompass the screenplays for Milos Forman's Hair and Ragtime. First performed in 1970 under the title Cancer at the Royal Court Theatre in London under the direction of Peter Gill, the play chronicles a year in the life of eight college students living communally in an off-campus attic apartment during the mid-1960s, exploring with what the New York Times described as a discerning eye and a journalist's detachment the generation that came of age during the Vietnam War. The critical connection between Cancer and Alan Schneider is both direct and consequential: Schneider, already celebrated as the foremost American interpreter of Beckett and Albee, saw a London run-through of the play and brought it to the Arena Stage in Washington before transferring it to Broadway, where it opened in February 1972 with a cast including Christopher Guest, Jill Eikenberry, and James Woods, subsequently earning an acclaimed off-Broadway run at the Theatre de Lys in 1973 and 1974, and Schneider went on to direct Weller's Loose Ends at the Arena Stage and on Broadway as well, making theirs one of the more productive director-playwright relationships of the American theater in the 1970s.
Cancer.
$975.00
In Stock
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