Giants Have Us in Their Books
Description
This collection includes six short plays: FLOWERS, TAPE, A TIGER IN CENTRAL PARK, GAS, THE CROOKED CROSS, and THE WINGED MAN. The genesis of these fairy tales for adults was Mr. Rivera’s daughter who asked where fairy tales came from and was told that people made them up and put them in books. ”Oh,” she replied, ”then giants have us in their books.” The plays that followed were written ”as if we were the subject of stories told by giants.” FLOWERS: Lulu’s acne must have some cosmic meaning, perhaps punishment for her vanity, but when the acne morphs into hibiscus flowers, she believes she is cursed. Her little brother, Beto, however, sees an “unearthly beauty” in the flowers. TAPE: If we suspected everything we said was being recorded, would we act differently? A TIGER IN CENTRAL PARK: A runaway tiger renders the island of Manhattan impotent. GAS: A man goes to a gas station to fill up his tank. The Gulf War has just started, and the man’s brother is fighting in it. The gas comes out red. THE CROOKED CROSS: A high-school girl dons swastika earrings, given to her by her boyfriend, and finds that her life soon turns into a nightmare. THE WINGED MAN: A young girl bears the child of a fabled flying man.
Plays in This Collection
Press Quotes
“José Rivera’s GIANTS HAVE US IN THEIR BOOKS, is subtitled ‘Six Children’s Plays for Adults.’ The genesis of the plays, he explains in a program note, was his four-year-old daughter’s observation that, if we have giants in our fairy tales, they must have us in theirs. Rivera wrote the plays, he says, ‘as if we were the subject of fairy tales told by giants.’ It’s an apt notion. The six short plays in GIANTS have all the beautiful simplicity of fairy tales … Rivera’s prose has become more concentrated and spare, more pregnant with metaphor and poetry. The profuse and sometimes self-consciously fantastical stew of magic realism — which, like his mentor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rivera insists is just another form of everyday reality — has been condensed so that each image carries greater weight. The six short fables in GIANTS add up to two hours of compelling, entertaining and provocative theater.” —Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Examiner
Author
José RiveraJosé Rivera is an award-winning screenwriter and playwright. Mr. Rivera has won two Obie Awards for playwriting for MARISOL and REFERENCES TO SALVADOR DALI MAKE ME HOT, both produced at The Public Theater in New York. His plays THE PROMISE, EACH DAY DIES WITH SLEEP, CLOUD TECTONICS, THE STREET OF THE SUN, SUEÑO, SONNETS FOR AN OLD CENTURY, SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS, BRAINPEOPLE, GIANTS HAVE US IN THEIR BOOK and THE HOUSE OF RAMON IGLESIA have been produced in theaters across the country and around the world. Plays-in-progress include THE LAST BOOK OF HOMER, HUMAN EMOTIONAL PROCESS, THE HOURS ARE FEMININE, a new translation of KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN and SCREAM FOR THE LOST ROMANTICS. ADORATION OF THE OLD WOMAN made its New York debut at INTAR Theatre in March 2014. Celestina, based on his play CLOUD TECTONICS, will mark his debut as a feature film director. Mr. Rivera has received awards from the Fulbright Arts Fellowship, the Whiting Foundation, the Kennedy Center, National Endowment for the Arts, the National Arts Club, New York Foundation for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Mr. Rivera's screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries was nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 2005 making him the first Puerto Rican writer to be nominated for an Academy Award. Also nominated for a BAFTA and a Writers Guild Award, The Motorcycle Diaries won top writing awards in Spain and Argentina. His screenplay based on Jack Kerouac's On the Road premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and was distributed nationally in the winter of 2013. His film Trade was the first film to premiere at the United Nations. He has story credit on the film The 33 and shares credit on Letters to Juliet. Other screenplays include The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Scott Rudin, producer); The State Boys Rebellion; Compositions in Black and White; Three Apples Fell From Heaven (Shekhar Kapur, director); Face Value; Riders on the Storm; American Rust; The Crown (Rodrigo Garcia, director); Vincent (Ben Foster, director); Patriotic Treason (Giancarlo Esposito, director); White Fang (Lance Acord, director); Deity; an untitled film based on the Korean film Failan (Andres Moore, director); and Even Silence Has an End. Television credits include an untitled HBO pilot, co-written and produced by Tom Hanks; The House of Ramon Iglesia; A.K.A. Pablo (Norman Lear, producer); The Eddie Matos Story; Eerie, Indiana (co-creator and producer); Goosebumps; Mayhem (Bob Cooper, producer); The Conquest (Ron Howard, producer); and Latino Roots, an untitled 10-hour limited series for HBO. Mr. Rivera made his film-acting debut playing himself in Margarita with a Straw. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Sundance Institute and has been a creative advisor for Screenwriting Labs in Utah, Jordan and India. A member of the LAByrinth Theatre Company and Ensemble Studio Theatre, he leads a weekly writing workshop in New York City, where he lives. In the works is his first novel, Love Makes the City Crumble.
Book Information
| Publisher | BPPI |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 6/30/2014 |
| Pages | 72 |
| ISBN | 9780881455946 |