Twenty years ago, Mark David Major (author of Mars Rising) wrote three plays in a burst of creative activity over a three-year period. The first of these plays, The Persistence of Memory, premiered during a short, successful run at a historic St. Louis area theatre in May 1992. Since then, these plays have been waiting to be revisited by the author and discovered by a new generation of readers and patrons of the theatre. For the first time, The Persistence of Memory, The Truth of Glances, and Song of My Childhood are presented here in print, updated and revised by the author, including production photographs from the 1992 run of The Persistence of Memory at the Historic Miner’s Institute Theatre. This edition also includes prefaces written by the lead actors of the original cast for The Persistence of Memory and a new Introduction by the playwright reflecting on the creative genesis and literary influences of the plays, challenges and opportunities during the 1992 production, and the rationale for specific revisions and updates to the plays some twenty years later.
The plays embody the didactic nature of Generation X at its best and worst on the themes of romantic love and emotional honesty. It is characterized by a purity of perspective tinted with a cynicism wise beyond its years and a raw emotionalism carefully veiled under a mask of social indifference. These plays give voice to an entire generation, the children of a revolution...
Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-a is an author, artist, entrepreneur, architect and urban planner with extensive experience in academia, business, real estate, urban planning, and design in the USA and Europe. He is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Abu Dhabi University in the UAE. He is the author and playwright of several fiction and non-fiction titles including: Mars Rising (science fiction), The Persistence of Memory and Other Plays (theatre), Everyday Objects: Collected Poems, 1987-2012 (poetry), An Infinitesimal Abundance of Color and An Excessive Abundance of Curls (children’s books with Layce Boswell).
He has been published in several different venues, including academia, professional journals, newspapers, and poetry magazines for more than twenty years. His poem ‘Purchased Inertia’ appeared in the February 2011 issue of The View From Here Magazine. His poems also appeared in the anthologies On the Wings of Pegasus, Patterns of Life, Visions, Whispers, and the German e-journal, Poems Niederngasse. He is a member of the Poetry Society of America and the Association of Independent Authors.