In a time that emphasizes media spectaculars, the short play offers an exploration of minimal possibilities yet has the power to fix history in a moment's structure, a flash of revelation. The short play is a powerful and innovative theatrical medium, relying upon compression and clarity rather than amplification, and reducing character and action to a spare, dramatic core.
Schevill uses the short play to explore the power of the American environment and its expression in singularly American idioms and rhythms.
This collection inclues work produced between the late 1940s and the early...

In this collection, Schevill brings together a series of poems that he has been working on since his first book was published in 1947.
Diverse characters, both real and imaginary, reveal fantasies of American life and history. The dramatic voices of the characters contrast with the subjective voice of the narrator as he moves through time and space, remembering and anticipating.

In this collection, Schevill brings together a series of poems that he has been working on since his first book was published in 1947. Diverse characters, both real and imaginary, reveal fantasies of American life and history. The dramatic voices of the characters contrast with the subjective voice of the narrator as he moves through time and space, remembering and anticipating.

In 1970 Adrian Hall s production of "Lovecraft s Follies" by the Trinity Repertory Company was praised in "The New York Times" as a hilarious extravaganza with music that is also an earnest attempt to come to grips with the guilts and terrors of the Age of Technology. The sucess of this production heralded James Schevill s arrival as an important American playwright dedicated to a new kind of theatre that he calls in the introduction to this book, Poetic Realism. This volume includes "Lovecraft s Follies" and, published here for the first time, Schevill's most experimental play, "The Ushers,"...

This second volume of James Schevill's collected poems is a companion to his remarkable ongoing sequence of poems, "The American Fantasies," published by Swallow in 1983. This collection extends the scope of the poet's concern with American power and influences to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. In these poems, Schevill reveals again the range of his lyrical and dramatic powers. As M.I. Rosenthal has written, Schevill has a scholar's appetite for genuine knowledge, a playwright's feeling for vigorous detail illuminating personalities and situation, and a lyric poet's gift for...