Esoteric Plays

by Lance Tait

Remarkable for it its wide range of theater techniques, “Esoteric Plays” contains sixteen wildly inventive plays that present strange mental journeys through life and love. The dramas are often surreal, dryly humorous, iconoclastic and unexpected. The plays are variously indebted to experimental European drama of the Twentieth Century, to English Mystery Plays of the Middle Ages, to Japanese Noh and to other plays and other examples of theater from around the world. Plays “The Glass Ceiling”, “Dmitri”, “Conquests”, “All Is Well that Endeth Well”, “Miss Julie”, “David Mamet Fan Club”, “Never Let Them See You Sweat”, “Read to Me”, “The Babysitter/Germany”, “East Play”, “Betsy Philadelphia”, “Mad Cow Disease in America”, “A Family Portrait”, “Jesus and the Monkfish”, “Behave, My Sorrow”, and “Live Free or Die”.

347 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 8, 2014

About the author

"Werewolf and Idol" is Lance Tait's first novel. His extensive work for the stage includes theatrical adaptations of 17 short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. His one-act and full-length plays (40+ in total) have been produced or received staged readings in New York, Boston, the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University, Los Angeles, Denver, Toronto, the United Kingdom, South Africa, South Korea and Paris, France. He is also the author of popular comedy sketches published on Amazon. In 2002, he founded Theatre Metropole in Paris. He has been active as a director/writer/producer of short films on the internet, as well.

Influences and likes (novelists): Sherwood Anderson (“Winesburg, Ohio”), Honoré de Balzac, Emily Brontë, François-René de Chateaubriand, Anton Chekhov, Philip K Dick, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexandre Dumas, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hermann Hesse, Stanisław Lem, Mario Vargas Llosa, Edgar Lee Masters (“Spoon River Anthology”), Herman Melville, Robert Musil, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary Shelley, Frank G. Slaughter, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Stendhal, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Kurt Vonnegut, HG Wells, Virginia Woolf; (short story authors) Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe.