Entertaining Mr. Sloane.
ORTON, Joe [Alan Schneider].
Entertaining Mr. Sloane.
First Edition of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane; From the Collection of Broadway Director Alan Schneider
New York: Grove Press, 1965.
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Item Number: 152311
First American edition of Joe Orton’s first major play, the black comedy that made his name. Octavo, original printed wrappers. The play received its American premiere on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in 1965, the year of this first American edition, in a production directed by Alan Schneider. 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 Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1956 and remained Beckett’s preferred American director, staged the United States premieres of 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? From the Collection of Alan Schneider. In very good condition with light toning to the wrappers and minor edgewear.
Entertaining Mr. Sloane was Joe Orton’s first major play and the work that established him as one of the most original and provocative dramatists of the 1960s. A black comedy first staged in London in 1964, it concerns a charming and amoral young lodger, Sloane, who becomes the object of desire of both his middle-aged landlady and her brother, even as the household conceals a murder. Its mixture of menace, farce, and polished epigrammatic wit gave rise to the term “Ortonesque,” and the play was voted best new play of its year by London’s drama critics. Orton’s career was cut short in 1967 when he was murdered by his lover and longtime companion Kenneth Halliwell, to whom this volume is dedicated, making him one of the most celebrated talents of the postwar British theatre to be lost so young.
