Books by Eric Overmyer

"…Duke was the man. The play [is] essentially a not-so-thinly-disguised homage to his amazingly rich and humble life, from early Olympic beginnings to an acting career in Hollywood, to being sheriff of Honolulu, to returning home and basking in the role of Hawaii's cultural ambassador. …`Here was a man who was as important to the people of Hawaii as Michael Jordan was to Chicagoans.' But we're not talking some dusty history lecture… Who could resist getting sucked into such a timeless fable? Duke's statue in Waikiki comes to life when it's discovered that Hawaii's surf has been missing for two weeks; the ocean's `like glass', the groms say. This is no average flat spell, he realizes as the ultra evil Mr Double Bogey has plans to turn the entire Hawaiian Island chain into the world's biggest golf course and convention center. Bogey's holding the surf hostage and won't give it back until Duke presents him with all Hawaii's land deeds. So-in between historically informative monologues detailing Duke's life-the good guys go looking for the surf, literally…" Marcus Sanders, Surf News

"IN A PIG'S VALISE is a musical comedy spoof of the hot-cool private-eye pulp fiction associated with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Except that it's wilder, much wilder. VALISE, among other oddities, features a stubby villain named Shrimp Bucket, an 'ethnic dancer' heroine named Dolores Con Leche (or, as the gumshoe hero, James Taxi, calls her, Sadness With Milk) and, in a bit part homage to Hammett's real-life lover, an undercover F B I agent named Lillian Hellman... Spiced with songs by August Darnell (Kid Creole) that bear such lines as 'Kiss me deadly' and 'Never judge a thriller by its cover' ... [a] broad, winking satire of the language and plot conventions of the old books and movies."Richard Christiansen, The Chicago Tribune

A richly atmospheric, riveting noir peopled with lowdown characters who raise double and triple-crossing to high art."Eric Overmyer [is] one of this nation's most accomplished and vividly imaginative playwrights." -Wayne Johnson, The Seattle Times"In NATIVE SPEECH, ON THE VERGE and IN PERPETUITY THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE, Eric Overmyer manifested a extraordinary command over the tools of language: sound, syntax and image ... In DARK RAPTURE, which premiered at Seattle's Empty Space Theater in May, Overmyer's verbal dexterity is acute as ever, but this time it's harnessed to a plot delivered by characters who seem driven by purposes of their own. It's by far Overmyer's most satisfying play. DARK RAPTURE may not, however, earn its author the critical praise it deserves - it certainly didn't in Seattle - because it adheres so strictly to the rules of the genre. In the written arts, in film, in dance, in pop music, a creative artist's submission to such rules earns no disrespect. In theater, it seems we honor work created within rigid conventions only if the conventions are someone else's: kabuki or kathakali, wayang or noh. DARK RAPTURE is 'noir,' the genre which crystallized in the 1940s novels and screenplays of Raymond Chandler and has intermittently borne fruit ever since in the hands of artists as various as Richard Condon and Wim Wenders. Good noir is rare on stage ... But his DARK RAPTURE is the most successful stage essay in the form since Len Jenkins's marvelous, poetic FIVE OF US. Like many noir fictions, DARK RAPTURE is about escape: from the self, from the sane, from the ordinary. This time the escape hatch is offered by a fire that leaves the Berkeley Hills home of Ray and Julia Gaines a pile of smoldering rubble with a charred and unrecognizable corpse beneath it. Whose corpse is it: Ray's, or a looter's? Just where was Julia when the house burned down? And what happened to the brown-paper parcel Julia says she left in Ray's custody? Did it go up in flames, too, with or without him? Any number of sinister people want to know. In classic noir manner, the story advances tableau by moody tableau from Baja bedroom to Key West bar deck to Tampa kitchenette, each offering its sharply etched character cameo, its fragment of information, its new complication, straight to a conclusion redolent with irony ..." -Roger Downey, American Theater

MI VIDA LOCA - My Crazy Life - tells the story of members of a troubled family who are reunited at their home on Washington's Olympic Peninsula as the father begins treatment for drug addiction."With a handful of plays ... Eric Overmyer has established himself as one of contemporary theater's wittiest playwrights." -Jan Stuart, Seven Days"Eric Overmyer [is] one of this nation's most accomplished and vividly imaginative playwrights." -Wayne Johnson, The Seattle Times

Among the most imaginative works of the 20th century, Eric Overmyer's ON THE VERGE OR THE GEOGRAPHY OF LEARNING captivates with its abundant invention. Three Victorian lady travelers take it upon themselves to discover the mystery of things as they set out for Terra Incognita and discover the future."Cross the wordplay of S J Perelman with the world-in-a-time-warp vision of Caryl Churchill and you might approximate the special flavor of ON THE VERGE. In Eric Overmyer's chimerical new comedy, three Victorian lady explorers set out on an adventure that takes them to darkest Africa, highest Himalaya and Terra Incognita ... Blending Tom Stoppard's limber linguistics with the historic overview of a Thornton Wilder, Mr Overmyer takes his audience on a mirthful safari ... spinning into time travel. Three 'sister sojourners', each a prototypical Victorian lady explorer, equipped with dialog as pithy as their helmets, thwack their machetes through the wilderness while telling tales of past jaunts among the natives. As intrepid trekkers, they put the lie to any charge that they are representatives of a weaker sex. Mr Overmyer has written a play that is joyfully feminist. Heroines to their heart, the explorers can accommodate themselves to any emergency (natural or man-made), although they are momentarily disoriented as they approach modern times. In their kaleidoscopic adventure, they journey through a rain forest of hundreds of artifacts from the future - household utensils, mechanical contrivances and a side-view automobile mirror that reads 'Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear.' How does one deal with such a chimera? ... In the play there is wit within the palaver. As one traveler says, 'I have seen the future and it is slang.' The author himself is an ecologist of language and a shrewd observer of our quest to control our environment - and the environment of others ... A frolicsome jaunt through a continuum of space, time, history, geography, feminism and fashion, Mr Overmyer's cavalcade is on the verge of becoming a thoroughly serendipitous journey." -Mel Gussow, The New York Times

Eric Overmyer's sparkling adaptation and synthesis of Beaumarchais's THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO and Ödön von Horváth's FIGARO GETS A DIVORCE. FIGARO/FIGARO follows the iconic characters of Figaro, Susanna, the Count and Countess Almaviva, and other favorites through the ups and downs inherent in all relationships - husband and wife, master and servant, family ties and the like. "Ödön von Horváth's magnificent 1936 FIGARO GETS A DIVORCE was conceived as a modern sequel to Beaumarchais's 1784 classic THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO and, naturally, has always invited comparison to the earlier work. In presenting the two in tandem, director Stan Wojewodski and adaptor Eric Overmyer have made the comparison easy and enjoyable and, remarkably, have created a single piece that occasionally shimmers with inspiration, acquiring an independent artistic identity." -Jonathan Kalb, The Village Voice "One of the more provocative productions to be seen in the last days of 1994 was the Yale Repertory Theatre's FIGARO/FIGARO ... a project that deserves more productions. It's full of rich possibilities." -Vincent Canby, The New York Times

A dreamy, meditative telling of the story of the father of ragtime Scott Joplin's rivalry with fellow musical genius Louis Chauvin. "Eric Overmyer is not a playwright who does things simply, so it's probably not enough to say that his latest theatrical conceit, THE HELIOTROPE BOUQUET BY SCOTT JOPLIN AND LOUIS CHAUVIN is a dream play. It's really three dreams wrapping themselves around one another like languid tendrils of opium smoke stirred by a ceiling fan. The first dreamer is Scott Joplin, widely heralded as the king of the ragtime composers, although when we initially meet him, slumped over a piano by the dim light of a Harlem morning, fame and inspiration are behind him, and his tortured mind is obsessed with sultry images of the 'poxy girls' in the House of Blue Light, a New Orleans sporting house he frequented as a youth. The second, more impertinent, dreamer is Louis Chauvin-Joplin's match, if not his better, in the art of syncopation-who had the misfortune (or the contrariness) to leave nothing behind him when he died of multiple sclerosis at twenty-six. The only concrete evidence of his genius is Heliotrope Bouquet, the slow drag two-step he wrote with Joplin, who saw to it that the sheet music got published. The third dreamer is Mr Overmyer himself, who has seized upon this fleeting collaboration and its few tangible details as the pretext for some graceful musings about the ephemeral nature of art and reputation …" David Richards, The New York Times "Resounding with the bittersweet mood and slow grace of the ragtime music it celebrates, Eric Overmyer's THE HELIOTROPE BOUQUET BY SCOTT JOPLIN AND LOUIS CHAUVIN is an elegiac fever dream of a play, a skillful weaving of fact and fancy played against a backdrop of memory, loss and the redemptive power of art… Overmyer's insertion of fantastical elements into conventional narrative has been used to comic, or at least whimsical, effect before, notably in his ON THE VERGE, OR THE GEOGRAPHY OF YEARNING. But in HELIOTROPE, the playwright spins this technique into a poignant composition peppered with moments of joyful release… Overmyer's rich, clever dialogue gives the play a sumptuous feel… Running under an hour and a half, HELIOTROPE is less like the ambitious ragtime opera that consumed Joplin's final years than the brief but startling collaboration that gives the play its name. Ending on a tentative note of hope and revival, Overmyer adheres to Joplin's musical tenet of 'sweet resolution' even as the cynical Chauvin's admonition lingers: 'Sweet resolution,' he tells Joplin, 'is the difference between music and life.'" Greg Evans, Variety

In a futuristic city, one man tells it like he sees it - Hungry Mother! He's the DJ with a strong pulse but a weak signal. He riffs on the truth with verbal virtuosity, with primal passion, with ambidextrous dexterity, with a sexy scream ... but when his visions begin to manifest themselves in sinister ways, is he being played by darker forces? Or are his words creating a dangerous truth? "Down at the bottom of your radio dial is a station with a weak signal but a strong message. The man behind the message calls himself Hungry Mother, and he's a disc jockey with a difference. In NATIVE SPEECH, the difference is playwright Eric Overmyer's chilling vision of a society about to go belly up ... NATIVE SPEECH shapes its ideas through a network of rich visual and verbal images rather than resorting to logic. Overmyer has created a wonderful hip language for Hungry to speak, and it never dies in his mouth no matter how surreal the psychic terrain through which we move. As in all good cautionary tales, the unspoken word behind the story is: beware." -Jay Reiner, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner