Donald Margulies Bücher

Donald Margulies offers up a vivid new adaptation of Sholom Asch's 1906 Yiddish melodrama, reset on the Lower East Side of New York at the turn of the century. The original English language edition first appeared on Broadway in 1923, but was closed down and the cast arrested for its portrayal of a lesbian love affair on stage. "Teasing out the pesky questions of spirit, love, family and commerce at the heart of Asch's play, Margulies has achieved crossover success, making God of Vengeance a profoundly American play."--Alisa Solomon, Village Voice Sholom Asch was a noted Yiddish novelist and playwright. Donald Margulies is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Dinner with Friends. His other work includes Collected Stories and Sight Unseen.

In his “absorbing intelligent” (Los Angeles Times) and timely new play, Donald Margulies uncovers the layers of a relationship between a photojournalist and foreign correspondent—once addicted to the adrenaline of documenting the atrocities of war, and now grounded in the couple’s Brooklyn loft. Photographer Sarah was seriously injured while covering the war in Iraq; her reporter partner James had left weeks earlier, when the stress and horrors became too much for him. Now James writes online movie reviews while Sarah recovers, mourning for her Iraqi driver (and former lover) killed in the explosion, and itching to get back behind the camera. With this play—coming to Broadway this winter—Margulies revisits themes of being an artist, as characters ask: What does it mean to capture suffering on film, rather than stopping to intervene?

Jonathan Waxman is the artist as superstar, plunged into the exorbitant hype of the American art world where a publicist is as necessary as a brush and canvas. Just before his works are celebrated at an exhibition in London, Jonathan journeys to the village where his former lover, Patricia, lives with her British husband, Nick. Archaeologists working on a dig, their spare existence is spent sifting through a Roman rubbish heap to discover the past. In their cold, remote house, Jonathan discovers an early painting of Patricia he'd done when they were young lovers. The subsequent struggle for the painting embodies the unreconciled passions of the past. Patricia has never forgiven Jonathan for leaving her, Nick despises Jonathan and the kind of art he produces, and Jonathan has never been able to recapture the inspiration and purity he felt when he painted Patricia. In taut scenes that dart from past to present and back, the characters are forced to deal with the unanswerable question of anti-Semitism, the legacy of the Holocaust and assimilation, the sadness of lost love, the role of the artist and the location of the human soul at the end of a ragged century.