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Jordan Harrison Full Length, Drama2m, 2f Int.
The Frau used to direct beautiful films for a fascist government. Now she’s trying to make a film that’s simply beautiful. The Frau casts herself in the lead role of the Amazon queen Penthesilea, who falls in love with Achilles on the battlefield of the Trojan War. She recruits a man from the Jewish ghetto to play her Achilles. Her own sister, a long-suffering extra, plays all the nameless Amazons killed in the background. With chariot crashes and adoring close-ups, it all has the makings of a glamorous war. But when telegrams start to arrive from the Minister of Propaganda, it becomes impossible for the Frau to ignore the real war outside her sound stage. A darkly comedic look at the role of artists during wartime, Amazons and Their Men is inspired by the life and work of Leni Riefenstahl. “The life of Leni Riefenstahl...has been examined and critiqued aplenty, but rarely so entertainingly as in Amazons and Their Men, a brash play by Jordan Harrison.”-The New York Times“ In a dramatic masterstroke, the playwright imagines Riefenstahl’s film as it could have been...”-New York Press“Filled with dazzling wordplay, archaic vocabulary, and odd malapropisms, the theatrical worlds of Jordan Harrison lift language off the page and into three-dimensional space, creating a universe that is surreal and sublime, brainy and beautiful—and wholly his own.”-Brooklyn Rail
Jordan Harrison is a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship Recipient
FEE: $75, per performance Performance licensing rights may be restricted in your area, please inquire for specific details and licensing availability.Click below for additional materials:
Amazons and Their Men (Logo Pack)
Other Jordan Harrison titles available from Samuel French include:
Doris to Darlene About the authorJordan is currently working on a musical for Ars Nova, a children’s play for the Arden Theatre, as well as plays for Actors Theatre of Louisville/Berkeley Rep and Playwrights Horizons. Jordan Harrison’s plays include Futura, Doris to Darlene, Amazons and Their Men, Act a Lady, Finn in the Underworld, The Museum Play, and Kid-Simple. His work has been produced at Playwrights Horizons, Berkeley Rep, Clubbed Thumb, Portland Center Stage, and the Humana Festival. Jordan is the recipient of a 2009 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, the 2008 Kesselring Fellowhip, the Heideman Award, a Theater Masters’ Innovative Playwright Award, Jerome and McKnight Fellowships, and a NEA/TCG Playwright in Residence Grant. A graduate of the Brown MFA program, he is a resident playwright at New Dramatists.
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