Mark E Leib

The Terry Plays and Mindscape Mark E Leib

In these four plays, Mark E. Leib ("a writer of slicing wit and intellectual velocity" -Newsweek) examines some of the most pressing issues of contemporary life, from the crisis of finding a viable way of speaking to an appropriate response to the atrocities of the Holocaust. In Terry by Terry, Leib presents first a small boy who suddenly refuses to speak, sending his family and teachers into comic disarray. Then, in Part Two, he dramatizes the plight of the "writer" of Part I-a radically disaffected misfit searching for a perfect play in which to live. In How They Wrestled Until Morning, the Terry character is a jilted lover, trying to find emotional safety on the night his beloved marries another man. And in An Angel From Auschwitiz, Terry is first a college-bound adolescent insisting that his father finally tell the truth about his experiences in World War II. Then Terry is a family man and playwright visited by a Holocaust survivor who demands that the writer give up all his other work and devote himself to memorializing the war's victims. The collection closes with Mindscape, in which the an Angel, a Devil, and an Ordinary Man make their cases to the audience in three probing and revealing monologues.