The Incomplete Amber Reed

The Incomplete Amber Reed is a rigorously incomplete compendium of Amber Reed’s partial, unfinished, and excerpted plays and fragments, including at least scenes from Scenes with Joyce Cho, The Grand Kindness, Mr. Apocope, The Aiken Character Calendar Book of Hours, Augustine of Hippo, and The Minister’s Black Veil, her adaptation-with-vegetables of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story of the same name. A member of Joyce Cho—the group of five weird, wily, lyrical, ludicrous playwrights whose total disregard for the realistic manifestation of their extravagant and poetic scenarios has revolutionized or at least revolted the modern American theater—Amber Reed’s writing is protean and quicksilvery. She moves from one experiment to the next, never settling, addressing our perfections, and yet in her flight so unsettling the theatrical landscape that she makes perfection itself démodé. In its incomprehensiveness, this collection eschews the notion that these plays are to be comprehended—reduced, contained, explained, or “gotten” like a gumball from a gumball machine. As Mac Wellman writes of Joyce Cho, “I do not understand the work of these writers in the same way I do not understand the sky, the sea, and the secret of the forest. They are unlike any others I know in the theater of our time.” Or in Reed’s words, “I was here for this.” The Incomplete Amber Reed is a rigorously incomplete compendium of Amber Reed’s partial, unfinished, and excerpted plays and fragments, including at least scenes from Scenes with Joyce Cho, The Grand Kindness, Mr. Apocope, The Aiken Character Calendar Book of Hours, Augustine of Hippo, and The Minister’s Black Veil, her adaptation-with-vegetables of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story of the same name. A member of Joyce Cho—the group of five weird, wily, lyrical, ludicrous playwrights whose total disregard for the realistic manifestation of their extravagant and poetic scenarios has revolutionized or at least revolted the modern American theater—Amber Reed’s writing is protean and quicksilvery. She moves from one experiment to the next, never settling, addressing our perfections, and yet in her flight so unsettling the theatrical landscape that she makes perfection itself démodé. In its incomprehensiveness, this collection eschews the notion that these plays are to be comprehended—reduced, contained, explained, or “gotten” like a gumball from a gumball machine. As Mac Wellman writes of Joyce Cho, “I do not understand the work of these writers in the same way I do not understand the sky, the sea, and the secret of the forest. They are unlike any others I know in the theater of our time.” Or in Reed’s words, “I was here for this.”