Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise - by Harry Kondoleon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Harry Kondoleon has said his plays are "sad, scary, funny." Though his work has been compared to that of Joe Orton and Oscar Wilde, John Guare and Christopher Durang, his acute and elegant voice has from the first been distinctively his own.

Kondoleon's tragicomedies are peopled by extremists, their behavior bizarre. And yet these curious characters are driven by the most familiar of passions. Abandonment and betrayal define their pasts, shadow their present. They are needy and lonely and full of desire. They seek transcendence, and this impossible, fundamental longing takes forms both common and strange.

These plays are not only jet-black comedies. They are fairy tales, fables, passion plays, masquerades. Kondoleon's intensely theatrical sensibility is, finally, romantic. He sees the contemporary world clearly; he also sees other worlds: prior, within, beyond.

This volume also includes: Christmas on Mars, The Vampires, Slacks and Tops and Anteroom.

Review Quotes

"The strength from which all else flows is the passion for love, the unquenchable lust, the yearning for connection with the Other that defines the language and the form and the almost tropical feverishness of Kondoleon's plays." -Don Shewey, The Village Voice

"He is a poet in the theatre and a wit on the page, and what makes him both is his blazing vision of the life behind this one, the life we ought to be living and are not." --Michael Feingold

About the Author

Harry Kondoleon grew up in Queens and graduated from Hamilton College and the Yale School of Drama. His many plays have been performed at leading theatres across the country. He held Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships, and won Oppenheimer/Newsday and Obie awards.