Böcker utgivna av 53rd State Press

Drama. Poetry. It's easy to dismiss the Holy Ghost People. They travel door- to-door in white sheets spouting pseudoscience about time travel, wormholes, and a new galactic gospel. Most of the town has already laughed them away. But when the Holy Ghost People start to perform "miracles," denial becomes difficult, and conversation quickly shifts to what ought to be done. A new play in verse about science, religion, and group mentality by poet Joshua Young.

Context, Synecdoche, Homonym, and Polyseme live in a house laden with clutter, but Etymology keeps bringing new deliveries for Context: a blank book, a conversation with the dentist, a key. Homonym and Polyseme sort and rearrange; they send what they can to the cloud (via helium balloon); occasionally they smuggle out old things, lost for years, and new things they know Context will never need. Synecdoche tries to hold it all together and sings. Meanwhile, Context wonders whether listening is work-if it is labor, if it matters, and if what matters (if it matters) can be retrieved from the ever-accumulating material of living. meronymy is a kaleidoscopic, audiovisual performance-portrait of the technologies, ancient and modern, by which we cling to what we might otherwise forget. With wry tenderness and formal dexterity, Jendrzejewski builds a space in which to reckon with memory, loss, intrusion, and overflow amidst the cacophonic practice of living in language together.

The Incomplete Amber Reed is a rigorously incomplete compendium of Amber Reed's partial, unfinished, and excerpted plays and fragments, including at least scenes from Scenes with Joyce Cho, The Grand Kindness, Mr. Apocope, The Aiken Character Calendar Book of Hours, Augustine of Hippo, and The Minister's Black Veil, her adaptation-with-vegetables of Nathaniel Hawthorne's story of the same name. A member of Joyce Cho-the group of five weird, wily, lyrical, ludicrous playwrights whose total disregard for the realistic manifestation of their extravagant and poetic scenarios has revolutionized or at least revolted the modern American theater-Amber Reed's writing is protean and quicksilvery. She moves from one experiment to the next, never settling, addressing our perfections, and yet in her flight so unsettling the theatrical landscape that she makes perfection itself démodé. In its incomprehensiveness, this collection eschews the notion that these plays are to be comprehended-reduced, contained, explained, or "gotten" like a gumball from a gumball machine. As Mac Wellman writes of Joyce Cho, "I do not understand the work of these writers in the same way I do not understand the sky, the sea, and the secret of the forest. They are unlike any others I know in the theater of our time." Or in Reed's words, "I was here for this."

La Guía de campo de iLANDing contiene 75partituras para la investigación de espacios urbanos que fueron desarrolladas alo largo de diez años por el Laboratorio Interdisciplinario de Arte, Naturalezay Danza. En estos laboratorios, artistas y científicos generaban metodologíashíbridas para un acercamiento a la ecología urbana fundamentado en la danza ydiseñado para cualquiera que desee experimentar la incursión de la naturalezaen la ciudad o descentrar los métodos antropocéntricos habituales de navegarpor el mundo. Lleva una introducción de la fundadora de iLAND, Jennifer Monson.

David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group’s I Understand Everything Better is a "deeply felt and deeply moving" (New York Times) performance piece, a multi-disciplinary, dance-based work that explores the impulse to report on calamity, the shimmer of attention to realms unseen, and the evidence of the body as possessing a will to let go of living.Emerging from a year in which David Neumann lost both his mother and father, I Understand Everything Better documents a process of dying, and how the altered attentiveness of the dying and those who care for them can invite a complex layering of now and then, here and there, living room and mountain road. The text draws on Neumann’s accounts of his father’s final days as well as Noh theater, the Kyogen play Boshibari, Shakespeare’s King Lear, transcripts of live weather reporting (mostly during hurricanes), and interviews with end-of-life caregivers, doctors, and meteorologists.Advanced Beginner Group’s 2015 production—winner of two Bessie awards for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Sound Design—includes text by David Neumann and Sibyl Kempson. Edited and designed by Karinne Keithley Syers with photography by Maria Baranova, this volume is an elegant, richly layered record of a rigorously collaged, collaborative performance that was itself a record of a storm.

A dark and irreverent monologue that explores what happens when all we believe in is shattered.

Commissioned by Abrons Arts Center and the Chocolate Factory Theater in New York and presented by the 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr & Perf. Co. in the winter of 2021.

In the plays collected here--Ramp and Mushroom--Pulitzer Prize finalist Eisa Davis mingles modes of myth and speculation, documentary and fiction in two plays about family, desire, restorative justice, ecological sustainability, and immigration amongst the working class. Ramp adapts the foundational Egyption saga of Isis / Osiris and sets on a near-future airline ramp, where siblings Isis, Osiris, Seth, and Nepthys throw luggage on planes and bicker about our thorny, precipitate futurity: should change be fast or gradual? Can the ecological revolution we require for survival produce ease and peace if it's rooted in violence? Is the path to utopia brutal? Must it be? Mushroom centers on the lives, loves, and working conditions of the Mexican and Central American mushroom-pickers in and around the town of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, where over 40% of all the mushrooms we eat in this country come from. Through a series of intersecting narratives traversed by English, Spanish, K'iche' and Malayalam speakers, Mushroom considers a workplace dispute that has serious ramifications for multiple immigrant families, mapping how compassion and justice might intersect.

Trained in classical piano and Marxism and raised on jazz, gospel, pop, hip hop, and Black revolutionary politics, Pulitzer Prize finalist Eisa Davis’s plays are marked by her stunning intimacy with the praxis of music alongside radical change. In Angela's Mixtape, time shifts like a mixtape, and like a mixtape, the play is both a memoir and a gift—for us, of course, and for Davis’s aunt, activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis, under whose tutelage Davis reads Das Kapital and learns to drive stick and hack her own way toward inheriting her legacy. In The History of Light, Davis counterpoints the intertwining fates of two couples under racialized pressures a generation apart. Lush with the sound of the grand piano, The History of Light is a study in black and white, love and alienation. Underlying the political clarity and formal virtuosity of Davis’s writing are the unexpected crackles of a voice warming up, the crunchiness of missed notes. Because for an artist concerned, like Davis, with how we become who we are and might be, error is a necessary instrument—maybe the sounding weight.

Sibyl Kempson's Let Us Know Praise Susan Sontag is an irrational musical contemplation of collision of art and journalism.

In September 2021, playwright/performersEisa Davis and Jillian Walker met to discuss Walker's performance ritual, SKiNFoLK:An American Show (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in March 2022). InJanuary 2022, they met again to discuss Davis's installation performancepiece The Essentialisn't (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in2023). In these twin interviews about the uncanny ways their works mirroreach other, Davis and Walker take up questions of archive, memory, generationaltrauma, survivor's guilt, and the conundrum of performance given thecommodification and consumption of Black women's joy and pain. How toacknowledge, process, and heal the hurt that is felt? How to perform withoutbeing captured by others' ideas of what it means to be oneself?

A collection of interviews with New York theater artists who have spent their lives working in and inventing the avant-garde.

A wide-sweeping concert/play structured in seven movements that explores the questions and limits (?) of blackness, performance, and country in a sensuous and reflective cabaret experience.

A curated collection of costume designs and inspirations from an internationally renowned artist.

A collected volume from an acclaimed writer and performer whose work has roots in the Black American and Queer Performance traditions, and explores ideas of the Afromystical.

Two plays from gifted playwright Erin Courtney, including the acclaimed, Obie award-winning A Map of Virtue.