Shatterhand Massacree and Other Plays
The first volume of published plays by John Jesurun, one of the most innovative writer/director/media artists in America. The volume includes Shatterhand Massacree, Slight Return, Snow, and Firefall, demonstrating the range of the author’s work over two decades.
Published 2009
“The work's portrayal of patricide, mistaken identity, and the destruction and reconstruction of the family unit, focusing on pioneer farmers, evokes the conquest of the American West. At the same time, it offers a theatrical variation of Francois Truffaut's movie The Wild Child.”
- Stephen Holden, The New York Times READ HERE
John Jesurun: A Media Trilogy
Three media-plays by MacArthur Award-winning playwright-director-designer John Jesurun. DEEP SLEEP, WHITE WATER and BLACK MARIA chart the "loss of the real" in a landscape of adrenaline-charged freefall poetry, mediated images and vestiges of Pop culture. With an introduction by dramatist-poet Fiona Templeton, this collection gathers together for the first time a trilogy of significant works from one of the US' most lauded dramatists of the avant-garde.
Published 2009
Everything that Rises Must Converge
Influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, The Wooster Group, and Richard Foreman, John Jesurun began to produce his own theatrical pieces in the early 1980s. Everything That Rises Must Converge was first performed at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis and then at the Kitchen in New York in 1990. Mel Gussow, writing in the New Times, observed that the language of the play was complex, moving "backwards, forward and sideways," but "...what holds the audience's attention is the ingenious style of presentation. While we are still trying to correlate the barrage of words and of live video figures, some of whom appear to be talking to themselves, the rear wall suddenly swings to a perpendicular, revealing an entirely different audience sitting on bleachers on the opposite side of the stage. In a mirror reversal, they have been watching our actors on monitors and our monitor-actors on stage."