• The Jim Lehrer Plays
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The Jim Lehrer Plays

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It's the first debate of the 2004 presidential campaign and President George W. Bush is determined to kill PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer live on stage. His opponent, Senator Kerry, agrees Lehrer shoul...
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  • 15 May 2018
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It's the first debate of the 2004 presidential campaign and President George W. Bush is determined to kill PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer live on stage. His opponent, Senator Kerry, agrees Lehrer should die—"Indeed, what else tonight besides the manner of Jim Lehrer's execution could be of interest to any man?"—but disagrees on the matter of when and where. 12 years later, Jim Lehrer sits alone in his spacious and indifferently furnished DC suburban home narrating to himself the news of the day. That is until his roommate—also Jim Lehrer—rushes in to warn him of an angry mob descending on their location. Collected here for the first time, Chicago playwright Mickle Maher's The Jim Lehrer Plays—The Strangerer and Jim Lehrer and the Theater and its Double and Jim Lehrer's Double—connect and critique their times' political insanities while pulling inspiration from Camus, Artaud, and Maher's favorite news personality, Jim Lehrer.
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Price: $12.95
Pages: 128
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
Imprint: 53rd State Press
Publication Date: 15 May 2018
Trim Size: 8.00 X 5.00 in
ISBN: 9780999724729
Format: Paperback
BISACs: DRAMA / American / General, DRAMA / American / General
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"As the world of our politics keeps getting weirder, it's still trying to keep up with Mickle Maher's wrenchingly funny play. The Strangerer is here to prove that fiction can hold its own in the everlasting race with truth to the deepest depths of the very, very strange." — Austin Pendleton, award-winning actor & director

"In a time when reality is cynically dismissed as fake, Mickle Maher creates theater that questions what the nature of reality really is with ingenious language, mordant satire, and a stab in the heart of the dark, slippery truth." — Brian Azzarello, author of 100 Bullets & Moonshine

"One wants to shake Maher and shout, Why the hell Lehrer? Lehrer in his prime, Lehrer murdered, Lehrer multiplied, Lehrer formerly of PBS NewsHour, Lehrer with knives, Lehrer older, lonelier, dumber. With this icon of probity, Maher expresses our political and existential rage, our ironic amusement, and inappropriate musings. This absurdist, hilarious, deadpan set of pieces is brilliant." — Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolution & Wait Till You See Me Dance

"I like The Strangerer because it picks as its subject an ominous but rather unassuming historical event—complete with its iconic personas and political landscape—to make a stratospheric jump into either the absurd or the hyperreal. Its existential scope poses a challenge to what we call a play in order to interrogate. It's like: what are we even doing?" — Richard Maxwell, award-winning director & playwright

Mickle Maher's plays have appeared Off-Broadway and around the world, and have been supported by grants from the NEA, the Rockefeller MAP fund, and Creative Capital. They include: It is Magic; There is a Happiness That Morning Is; Song About Himself; Small Ball; An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening; The Hunchback Variations; The Strangerer; Jim Lehrer and the Theater and Its Double and Jim Lehrer’s Double; Spirits to Enforce; Cyrano (translator); The Cabinet; Lady Madeline; The Pine; and An Actor Prepares (an adaptation of Stanislavsky's seminal book). He is a cofounder of Chicago’s Theater Oobleck, and has taught playwriting and related subjects at the University of Chicago, Columbia College, and Northwestern University.