Stonewall Jackson’s House
This play is available below and is also included in the collection:
Description
While leading a tour of the haphazardly restored home of the Confederate general, a young African American docent suddenly has a revelation. An uproar ensues as she abruptly stops the tour and asks an affluent white couple if she can come home with them — as their slave! But the most astonishing moments are still to come … A sophisticated, yet unrestrained rampage through the well-intentioned, but agenda-laden forces of the politically correct.
Production Info
Full Length Dark Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
Press Quotes
“The gloves come off early in STONEWALL JACKSON’S HOUSE, Jonathan Reynolds’s caustic comic tirade against political orthodoxy. A woebegone black guide leading a group through the haphazardly restored home of the Confederate general suddenly stops the tour to ask a well-to-do white couple from Ohio if she can come home with them, as their slave. It’s a provocative moment: where is this playwright, who so deliciously savaged film making fifteen years ago in GENIUSES, headed with this tasteless conceit? Mercifully, not to a scene depicting modern slavery. The revolving panels of the play’s simple set are eventually pushed aside to reveal the rehearsal room of a small theater company whose self-righteous administrators, interviewing playwrights for the new season, denounce the play the audience has just sampled. With that, Mr Reynolds climbs on his soapbox for a ambling, funny, cranky and highly entertaining diatribe against all the agenda-laden forces and high-minded programs (especially of the liberal stripe) that he believes have conspired to wring common sense out of American political and cultural life. Affirmative action, political correctness, nontraditional casting, the welfare state, black studies, ethnocentrism, multiculturalism: Mr Reynolds pushes so many buttons he could have staged the play in an elevator … You don’t have to agree with Mr Reynolds’s inexhaustible supply of opinions to get a kick out of this … The plot of STONEWALL JACKSON’S HOUSE takes several outrageous turns, culminating in a hilariously radical restaging of the tour-guide scene along lines more politically palatable to the theater company’s old guard … But maybe a little more unvarnished spleen-venting is just what the theater needs.” —Peter Marks, The New York Times
“In STONEWALL JACKSON’S HOUSE, Jonathan Reynolds has created an American play of ideas much in the manner of Paddy Chayefsky, with intelligent characters expressing their philosophies with a wit that sparkles and stabs at the same time.” —Howard Waxman, Variety
“… the funniest and most outrageous play of the season, a withering fusillade of satire aimed at our comfortably congealed political orthodoxies. He’s brought brainy cantankerousness back with a vengeance.” —Jack Kroll, Newsweek
Author
Jonathan ReynoldsAll ten of Jonathan Reynolds's plays have been produced in New York, most recently DINNER WITH DEMONS, an autobiographical one-man show in which he prepared a full five-course meal onstage eight times a week. Other notable plays include the controversial STONEWALL JACKSON'S HOUSE, which the Pulitzer Drama Jury recommended for the award; GENIUSES, produced by Playwrights Horizons and which ran for a year Off-Broadway; and the first plays he wrote, a pair of one-acts, YANKS 3 DETROIT O TOP OF THE 7TH and RUBBERS at The American Place. Less notable plays include FIGHTING INTERNATIONAL FAT, also produced at Playwrights Horizons, AND TUNNEL FEVER OR THE SHEEP IS OUT, also produced at The American Place. Although five of his screenplays have also been produced, most notably Micki & Maude and My Stepmother is an Alien, his most memorable experiences in filmmaking have been with Apocalypse Now and Leonard Part 6, both of which could have gone either way. He is the recipient of Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundation grants as well as The Dramatists Guild Flora Roberts Award for Sustained Achievement. For five years, he was Treasurer of The Dramatists Guild of America, and for six years wrote a bi-weekly food column for The New York Times Sunday Magazine. His memoir, Wrestling With Gravy: A Life, with Food, was recently published by Random House, and his next play GIRLS IN TROUBLE was produced at The Flea Theatre in New York in February 2010. He passed away in November 2021 and was survived by his wife, the set designer and producer, Heidi Ettinger, along with two sons from his previous marriage and three stepsons.
Book Information
| Publisher | BPPI |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 4/1/2004 |
| Pages | 80 |
| ISBN | 9780881452389 |
Special Notes
Originally produced by The American Place Theater, New York
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypublishing.com