The Furies

At long last heres Bill Considines considered rollicking breezy deep avant-post take on what Poetry is what Theater is and what happens when these arts tumble dance through history together only to land simultaneously on page and stage. Equal parts Sophocles and Ashbery whose lineage from Electra right through to The Heroes he invokes Considine riffles the classics to fan a new breath of Pure Future. Perform these plays in your minds eye or take the dare and produce them on stage - they are transportative. IOW as Agamemnon says in Agamemnon King of Cars Lets prowl the great desert /Whooping on speed /In pick-up trucks or tanks./Lets all wear cowboy hats. - Bob Holman The Furies is a terrific intervention a unique contemporary dramatic verse collection with tropes of classic themes and characters. Considine has a poets lyric ease wit and calling and a sensibility that travels through the complicated dynamics of history and war. As Orestes asks Electra Shall I talk of our childhood and/ all the times you silently/ stared at the summer leaves/ and tried to imagine total death / nuclear war all at once and why?/ Do you remember our civil defense drills... This is a refreshing oral book and generously available here for actors and poet-performers on the stage as well as readers in the hand. Bravo! - Anne Waldman Just when I was wondering whatever happened to poets theater along comes William Considines thrilling collection of four verse plays The Furies. Much poets theater is heavy on the poetry (making it soporifically undramatic) or ignores language for quirky effects. Considines work however is miraculous both onstage and in the ear. Not only that he is learned funny witty big-hearted and timely. Take for example Solons daring disobedience in Prologue: Prehistory: You teach people / to say fantasies in public / and enjoy tall tales in meetings / so faking will succeed / as the political intelligence / of our people. Lincoln in Queens is as human as anything by Woody Guthrie with a unique take on our most written-about president who is back from the dead in Queens busy urging the narrator to find the Furies and speaking of God like a lost lover: I lived in faith in the old-fashioned fable / of suffering and moral endurance. / We purged the blood-curse on our nation: / slavery! Now you can escape / the iron shackles of war / the fable of blood atonement / the faith of Furies. After small productions around New York City over many years its great to have these plays in one place to be read and reread and one hopes performed again. --Elinor Nauen The Furies is an attack in dramatic verse on mythic sources of war and the tragic cycle. What starts in jest and hope becomes tragic and then deeply personal. Prologue: Prehistory sets the stage in theater and theory. Agamemnon King of Cars is a comic goat song; Iphigenia refuses to be sacrificed Odysseus returns from the underworld to plead for peace and the chorus decline to go to war. Electra turns the foretold stories on their head as Electra and Orestes refuse their parts leading to new tragedy. Lincoln in Queens is a tale in which Lincoln commands a contemporary poet to go in search of the fabled Furies to free them and abolish war. Its a tale in seven segments - Iron Unemployed A Vision Depression Journey The Furies and Offering - ranging from the Rustbelt and lingering wounds of the great war through personal and global depression to a final vision at the white sands of Alamogordo. These pieces produced separately are brought together here for the first time as a unified series.