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Tallahassee—Mac Wellman and Len Jenkin’s play with music which premiered in 2001—transplants Ovid’s life and Metamorphoses to something like Florida.
Exiled to backwater Alligator Alley, with no recourse but perambulation and Belles Lettres, Ovid’s path crosses with Bob Cerillos, who’s been changed into a woman for not paying his parking tickets, and “Bone” Mizell, a local cowboy. They’re all headed to Tallahassee, through a landscape of horrors and wonders. Whoop! Now Ovid’s a woman too. People can be changed into anything, far beyond the usual rivers and trees—lawn furniture, ideas, lights on the ocean. Meanwhile, the governor muses, Why not cut social services, schools, and the arts? Why not tax the air we breathe? The devil’s in the kitchen, cooking up a stew. Daddy’s in the alley, and he’s doing something new. Sister wanders by the tracks, out on the edge of town. God is in the bushes, and the night is coming down. So this is Tallahassee.
LEN JENKIN’s plays include SHAKEY JAKE + ALICE, JONAH, TIME IN KAFKA, AMERICAN NOTES, PILGRIMS OF THE NIGHT, DARK RIDE, MY UNCLE SAM, LIMBO TALES, and LIKE I SAY. His works for the stage, often directed by him, have been produced throughout the United States and Europe, as well as in China and Japan. Theatres include the NY Shakespeare Festival Public Theater (NY), Yale Rep (New Haven), Mark Taper Forum (LA), Undermain Theater (Dallas) Guthrie Theatre (Minneapolis). His adaptations for the stage include Voltaire’s CANDIDE, Aristophanes’ THE BIRDS, and Kafka’s A COUNTRY DOCTOR. His novel N JUDAH is currently available in bookstores and on Amazon. He also writes for film and television. He has received OBIE awards for Directing and Playwriting, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Award, a nomination for an Emmy Award, the Helen Merrill Award, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He has been a guest artist at the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio, the Sundance Institute and the Macdowell Colony. Len Jenkin is a Funhouse Philosopher at Coney Island, USA, and the Playwright-in-Residence at the Genomic Sciences Training Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is also a painter and a sculptor. Paintings of his are in the permanent collection of the American Museum of Visionary Art (AVAM) in Baltimore.
Mac Wellman is the author of more than 40 plays, including Harm’s Way, Terminal Hip, 7 Blowjobs, Jennie Richee, and The Offending Gesture, in addition to several novels and poetry collections. In 1990 Wellman received his first Obie. In a three-way tie (with himself) he won Best American Play for Terminal Hip, Bad Penny, and Crowbar. A Best Playwriting Obie followed in 1991 for Sincerity Forever. Among his many honors were NEA grants in 1990 and 1995, and a Guggenheim fellowship in 1990, a Bessie Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. Wellman received his third Obie in 2003, this time for Lifetime Achievement. In 1998 he began teaching at Brooklyn College, where he developed a legendary MFA program and nurtured a current of antic strangeness in the American theater.