Complete Theatre: Oscar Mandel
"A voice like no other"
"To see a good play is lovely; to read it is wonderful!"
The Complete Theatre of Oscar Mandel is a monumental gathering of the author's twenty comedies and tragedies and forty-three short dramatized fables, all of them works produced or published from 1961 to 2002, but the majority of them revised and in some cases rewritten in 2020-2022 in preparation for this final and definitive edition.
Whether comic or tragic, whether set in modern times or ancient history or imagined lands, Mandel's plays are always highly imaginative, as titles like The Virgin and the Unicorn, How Alootook Came to Dance a Gavotte, And the Lord God Planted a Garden, Sigismund Prince of Poland already foretell. Thus the place they will occupy in the history of American drama is not alongside a masterpiece of gritty realism like Death of a Salesman but in kinship with, for example, the "poetic" drama of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth.
This 766 page volume contains the final versions of Oscar Mandel's twenty plays produced and published over a period of sixty years, collected by Insert Press between the covers of the author's Complete Theatre, along with the forty-three mini-dramas of his much-loved Kukkurrik Fables. Powerful on stage, they are even more compelling for the reader, who can pause, reflect and re-read them.
The plays are presented in clusters. The first cluster contains plays set in modern times; the second cluster consists of plays with highly varied historical backgrounds; the third features recreations of stories from Greek mythology; deeply original retellings of Old and New Testament tales make up the fourth cluster; in the fifth will be found comedies set in backgrounds of pure fantasy. The sixth and final cluster consists of the little fables, each one presided over by a dramatic Narrator. Readers familiar with Thornton Wilder's Skin of Our Teeth will recognize that all the plays, including those set in modern times, are "members" of the same tradition that Wilder illustrated, one that Oscar Mandel has called, in one of his essays, the high imagination.
With titles like The Fatal French Dentist, How Alootook Came to Dance a Gavotte, Prince Poupon Needs a Wife, Honest Urubamba and the like, it's easy to guess that Oscar Mandel's plays, some droll, some tragic, some best described as grand in conception, are without exception works of the high imagination. This is true even for those which are set in the here-and-now, as even a title like Living-Room With 6 Oppressions intimates. In the others, readers and audiences are transported to Nantucket in 1776, to historic Poland, to Ancient Greece, to the Jerusalem of the Crucifixion, To Bolivia, even to the Garden of Eden! But there's nothing ancient or outdated about the ideas Oscar Mandel conveys in his plays, whatever their settings, nor in his merry-grim fables-like the one about the tiger who tried to be humane and was shot all the same. His plays and fables speak powerfully one and all to the perennial issues that interest and all to often bedevil mankind.