ABOUT

Selected Plays of Jay Wright
Volume I: The Dramatic Radiance of Number
Volume II: Figurations and Dedications

Selected Plays of Jay Wright published in Chicago by Kenning Editions and Every house has a door / Project Editor: Will Daddario / Cover design by Crisis Studio / Interior composition by Cory Rockliff

Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery
2156 West Fulton St.
Chicago, IL 60612

Saturday November 12, 4:00

Please join Every house has a door for a staged reading of the first ten pages of the play Passage from Selected Plays of Jay Wright Volume I: The Dramatic Radiance of Number, directed by Lin Hixson, featuring performers Sebastián Calderón Bentin, Kenya Fulton, Matthew Goulish, and Jenny Polus. A live musical set for solo saxophone by Nick Mazzarella will follow the reading.

Jay Wright was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1934 and currently lives in Vermont. Wright was a professional baseball player, a member of the U.S. Army medical corps, a jazz bassist, and has been a visiting professor of literature at many universities. Active during the Black Arts Movement and the New American Poetry, his first poetry collection was published in 1967 and he has since published over fifteen books of poetry—including Thirteen Quintets for Lois (2021), Music’s Mask and Measure (2007), The Guide Signs: Book One and Book Two (2007), Transfigurations: Collected Poems (2000), Elaine’s Book (1988), The Double Invention of Komo (1980), and The Homecoming Singer (1971). He is also the author of more than forty plays and a dozen essays. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Wright’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, a Joseph Compton Creative Writing Fellowship (Dundee University), the Hodder Fellowship (Princeton University), and The American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

This two-volume set, the first such collection of this esteemed poet’s writing for the theater, offers an expansive look into an under-explored area of the his body of work, spanning over four decades, from the early 1970s to 2015. Those who know Wright’s poetry will find familiar rhythms and figures. New to the scene, however, is the mobilization of polysemy, quantum entanglement, and global-American identities within theatrical form. Arriving amid a pandemic, however, when the face of theatre has been forced to change in order to comport itself to new restrictions on liveness, these texts seem to challenge us to find other ways to perform, to tell stories, to grow together. Moving between Vermont, the Sandia Mountains, unnamed rivers, San Pedro, an urban square, Boca Negra, Mesa City, and numerous liminal spaces of ritual and incantation, these plays, selected by Jay and Lois Wright, showcase quotidian terrestrial affairs spliced with spiritual ascendency.

Selected Plays of Jay Wright was made possible in part by subscribers and supporters of Kenning Editions. Every house has a door gratefully acknowledges support for this publication and this event by The MacArthur Funds for Art and Culture at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, and the generosity of individual donors.