New Perspectives Theatre Company in association with the New School for Drama presents

“A Battle of Wits”
The Short Plays by Djuna Barnes

A Passion Play (1918), Kurzy of the Sea (1920), Little Drops of Rain (1922), and The Dove (1926).

Directed by Melissa Attebery; Dramaturgy by Jessica Holman

On Her Shoulders is pleased to present staged readings of four short plays by Djuna Barnes, directed by Melissa Attebery on Wednesday, June 7, 2017. Doors open at 6:30pm.

The Play in Context, which situates the script in its historical time and place and is supported by the LPTW, kicks off the evening at 6:45pm with an Introduction by dramaturg Jess Holman.

Admission is by Donation. Running time, including a post-performance Q&A is approximately 100 minutes.

The performance is at The New School, Starr Foundation Hall, University Center, 63 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003. R.S.V.P. to newper37@gmail.com.

DJUNA BARNES (1892-1982) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, journalist, and visual artist, as well as an important figure in the Modernist movement. She spent much of her long life in Greenwich Village, where she died a virtual recluse in 1982, but she lived for extended periods in France and England. Deeply influenced by the French symbolists of the late nineteenth century and by the surrealists of the 1930s, she also wrote as a liberated woman, whose unconventional way of life is reflected in the individuality of her literary style. In 1915, Barnes anonymously published The Book of Repulsive Women. Not long after, she moved to Paris and became associated with the writers and artists who made that city the international center of culture during the 1920s and early 1930s. Her Ladies Almanack was privately printed in Paris in 1928, and Ryder, her first novel was published in the U.S. the same year. Barnes’ most famous work is Nightwood (1936), a surrealistic story set in Paris and the U.S., dealing with the complex relationships among a group of strangely obsessed characters, most of them homosexuals and lesbians. Barnes wrote little after Nightwood, but her literary talents revived with The Antiphon, a verse-drama originally published in 1958. The plays of Djuna Barnes are some of the most curious works of American drama. Combining the realist settings and Irish speech patterns of the plays of J. M. Synge, an Oscar Wildeian sense of wit, and an often sentimental portrait of down-and-out New Yorkers, Barnes’ earliest plays are odd amalgams of styles at war with one another. Few critics of the day could make much sense of her plays—while they all seemed to recognize something interesting was happening on stage, most reviewers were puzzled. Alexander Wolcott quipped of Three from the Earth, “[The play] is enormously interesting, and the greatest indoor sport this week is guessing what it means.” Only S. J. Kaufman recognized Barnes’s talent: “Miss Barnes’ play is so near to being great that we hope that we shall be able to see it again. And we hope it’s printed . . . Even now as we write, the power, the simplicity and withal the incalculable depth of it has us enthralled.” Kaufman did get his wish. Three from the Earth was reprinted in A Little Review and, subsequently, in both Barnes’ A Book and in its republication as A Night Among the Horses in 1929. However, none of her short plays were reprinted until Douglas Messerli collected 16 of them in At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays, published in 1995. Barnes was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961. She was the last surviving member of the first generation of English-language modernists when she died in New York in 1982.