Synopses & Reviews
FROM HER COLLEGE days onward, Dawn Powell dreamed of becoming a successful playwright. Indeed, over the course of four decades, she finished at least ten plays and was working on fashioning her novel
The Golden Spur into a musical comedy during her final illness. Only two of her plays were mounted during her lifetime, however. This volume contains both of those works -
Big Night which was produced by the legendary Group Theater in 1933, and
Jigsaw, which was staged by the Theater Guild the following year. These are fast-paced, blunt-spoken - and very funny - comedies that directly anticipate the hard-boiled satire of such novels as
Turn, Magic Wheel and
Angels on Toast. Rounding out the book are two unpublished (and as yet unproduced) plays that Powell wrote in the late 1920s - the experimental, quasi-expressionist
Women at Four O'Clock and a nostalgic, bittersweet story of old New York,
Walking Down Broadway, which director Erich von Stroheim would later adapt into the Hollywood film
Hello, Sister!Eleven of Dawn Powell's fifteen novels are currently available in paperback from Steerforth Press, as well her widely acclaimed diaries. She died in 1965.
About the Author
MICHAEL SEXTON is a freelance director based in New York City. He has recently been an Artist in Residence at the Public Theater, the Resident Director at New Dramatists, and a Visiting Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was born in Brooklyn.
TIM PAGE served, until recently, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning chief music critic for the Washington Post. He is the author of Dawn Powell: A Biography.
Table of Contents
Big night -- Jig saw -- Women at four o'clock -- Walking down Broadway.