Levitation

by Timothy Mason

The place is the front porch of a comfortable old house in suburban Minneapolis, the time a summer night in the late 1970s. Arriving home unexpectedly to visit his family, Joe, a would-be playwright who earns his living working for a newspaper in New York City, finds the house locked and apparently deserted. Then his father, a retired minister who has been sitting in the backyard watching for shooting stars, suddenly appears, followed in turn by other family members and friends. Included are Joe's mother; his sister and her young son; a favorite former teacher of his father's (who, by Joe's calculation, should have died years before); Orville Wright (who really can't still be alive); and Joe's male lover, Ira, a flippant young Jewish caterer from New York who, unaccountably, seems to get along famously with the others. As the action progresses the line between the real and the imagined becomes progressively more blurred until, in the play's deeply affecting final moments, Joe comes to accept both the fact of death and the transitoriness of life, and to realize that the two are a continuum in which our loved ones are never lost to us as long as memory persists.

61 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Tim Mason is a playwright whose work has been produced in New York City, throughout the United States, and around the world. Among the awards he has received are a Kennedy Center Award, the Hollywood Drama-Logue Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Rockefeller Foundation grant. In addition to his dramatic plays, he wrote the book for Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical, which had two seasons on Broadway and tours nationally every year. He is the author of the young adult novel The Last Synapsid. The Darwin Affair was his first adult novel.

source: Amazon

Reviews

[Blackangel]

i am feel lucky.

[Marcy Chevako]

Beautiful and tragic and deeply self reflexive in a way that is very Tim Mason. I am very happy that I got to meet and know and even be friends with a man that I did not even realize was one of the great play writes of the 20th century. Got to see this read by actors who were close to him live, and like holy shit what a privilege it is to hear this dialogue read and acted aloud. Tim was a very anxious man and he did not like Los Angeles very much but he did like me and I liked him. He was- and I only recognize this in hindsight- the only gay person I had growing up who was actually *old*, who had actually lived through many different eras of our country's history and had stories to tell about all of them. That was important to me. It still is. I am very sad I will never again get to have dinner with him and listen to him crack jokes about missing his cue the one and only time he performed the lead of this play on stage and laugh until I can't breath. Empty houses and planets that hit stars and portals into the past and science and god and flight.

[leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

all the best bits of Our Town meets Heroes of the Fourth Turning and maybe also Kushner? I love a play that takes place in one night in a backyard in the midwest is all I’ll say.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those plays that's difficult to describe because it's all about character and relationships and memory. Consequently, it's an even harder play to market. That being said, there are some great opportunities for actors here, and some meaty monologues. In the end, Levitation is funny, touching, and sympathetic.

[Shihab Sami]

It is beautiful and wonderful