In 1970 Adrian Hall's production of Lovecraft's Follies by the Trinity Repertory Company was praised in The New York Times as a "hilarious extravaganza - with music - that is also an earnest attempt to come to grips with the guilts and terrors of the Age of Technology." The success of this production heralded James Schevill's arrival as an important American playwright dedicated to a new kind of theatre that he calls in the introduction to this book, "Poetic Realism." This volume includes Lovecraft's Follies and, published here for the first time, Schevill's most experimental play, The Ushers, two parts of a trilogy on themes of power emerging out of the 1960s (the third play in this trilogy, Cathedral of Ice, is available in the international anthology, Plays of the Holocaust). 5 Plays 5 also includes three of Schevill's recent plays, Mother O or The Last American Mother, Shadows of Memory: A Doublebill about Dian Fossey and Djuna Barnes, and The Last Romantics, which have helped to secure his reputation as an original voice in the American theatre.
