The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks and Democracy and Esther: Two Plays
LINNEY, Romulus [Alan Schneider].
The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks and Democracy and Esther: Two Plays
First Edition of The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks and Democracy and Esther; Inscribed by Romulus Linney to Director Alan Schneider
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.
$650.00
In Stock
Item Number: 152218
First edition of this collection of two plays by Romulus Linney. Octavo, original publisher’s cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author in the year of publication on the front free endpaper, “For Alan Schneider with many thanks and best wishes, Romulus Linney, New York, April 1973.” The recipient, Alan 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? Fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by Wendell Minor.
Romulus Linney was among the most admired and prolific American playwrights of his era, the author of dozens of plays produced throughout the United States and abroad, a revered teacher of playwriting, and the father of the actress Laura Linney. The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks, the more celebrated of the two plays collected here, grew out of Linney’s own Army service at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii in the 1950s and his fascination with the Japanese Noh theater and the tradition of shinju, or love suicide: framed as a military hearing, it investigates the ritual double suicide of a commanding general and his wife, staged as a protest against the Vietnam War that had claimed their son. The play premiered on Broadway at the ANTA Theatre in February 1972, produced by Cheryl Crawford and directed by John Berry. Its companion piece, Democracy and Esther, weaves together the two novels of Henry Adams — Democracy and Esther — into a portrait of love, faith, and political corruption in Gilded Age Washington. Over a long career Linney earned election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which honored him with its Award of Merit Medal for Drama, as well as Obie Awards, including one for sustained excellence in playwriting; the Signature Theatre Company in New York devoted its entire inaugural 1991–92 season to his work.
