The Incomplete Amber Reed

The Incomplete Amber Reed is a rigorously incomplete compendium of Amber Reeds 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 Ministers Black Veil, her adaptation-with-vegetables of Nathaniel Hawthornes story of the same name. A member of Joyce Chothe 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 theaterAmber Reeds 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 dmod. In its incomprehensiveness, this collection eschews the notion that these plays are to be comprehendedreduced, 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 Reeds words, I was here for this.