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Ulysses S. Grant faces mortality and his own failing memory in this "exciting and vivid" play by the Tony Award-winning author of Six Degrees of Separation (Michael Feingold, Village Voice).
Arthur Schlesinger calls A Few Stout Individuals "a political extravaganza." This latest work from award-winning playwright John Guare, author of House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, addresses ideas of history and memory, fame and ignominy, reason and insanity with his trademark Guare imagination.
In a Fifth Avenue brownstone in 1880s New York, former president and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant is penniless, dying of throat cancer, and attempting to finish his memoirs while he's cajoled and pestered by everyone from his wife and children to Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) and, by way of drug-induced hallucinations, the Emperor of Japan. A thoroughly original play that explores the nature of memory, ambition, and history itself, A Few Stout Individuals is "unmistakably the product of Mr. Guare's exotic yet very American imagination" (Ben Brantley, The New York Times).
Arthur Schlesinger calls A Few Stout Individuals "a political extravaganza." This latest work from award-winning playwright John Guare, author of House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, addresses ideas of history and memory, fame and ignominy, reason and insanity with his trademark Guare imagination.
In a Fifth Avenue brownstone in 1880s New York, former president and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant is penniless, dying of throat cancer, and attempting to finish his memoirs while he's cajoled and pestered by everyone from his wife and children to Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) and, by way of drug-induced hallucinations, the Emperor of Japan. A thoroughly original play that explores the nature of memory, ambition, and history itself, A Few Stout Individuals is "unmistakably the product of Mr. Guare's exotic yet very American imagination" (Ben Brantley, The New York Times).
LanguageEnglish
PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
Release dateFeb 26, 2020
ISBN9780802199669
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A Few Stout Individuals - John Guare
ACT ONE
An extraordinary masked apparition appears: the EMPEROR OF JAPAN.
THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN I am the emperor of Japan
I am the throne of chrysanthemum
I am the center of the disk that is the sun
I am the horizon behind which the golden sun rises
I give the sun to you each morning
I take the sun back each night
I am the moon who casts a cool light on the ocean which I also am
I am shadow
I am light
I am memory I am memory I am memory I am memory
A dark room, lit by a few hurricane lamps. USG, sixty-three, but looking ancient, sits wrapped in blankets in a wheelchair, in pain, toothless, wasted, his voice a harsh fierce whisper.
USG But who am I?
THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN I am the emperor of Japan
I am the throne of chrysanthemum
USG I know who you are. Who am I?
CLEMENS’S VOICE Who am I? What is he saying?
THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN Why did the South last so long?
USG The south of what?
THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN Why did the South fight? Were they all fighting for slavery?
USG I don’t know what you’re talking about—
THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN They weren’t all slaveholders. It’s not why the South lost. How did they hold on so long? Why did it take you so long?
USG I didn’t ask you here for this. I asked you—
THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN Why did you summon me?
USG I can’t remember.
Other people are dimly visible in the room: SAMUEL CLEMENS, a blustery man, fifty, red hair turning white. MRS. G, fifty-nine, terrified. ADAM BADEAU, fifties, very lame, pale, red
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