Click on the images to read more about the plays.
Mr. Harrison’s theater career, spanning 50 years, began with a play written and staged at boarding school, and continued at college with productions of Beckett, Pinter, Brecht, and Shakespeare, leading to Dante Kaputt!, written in his last year at college and produced professionally, at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, in 1966. 42 stage plays, 40 radio plays, and over a hundred scripts for TV and film have followed. Beside three new plays completed and intended for production at Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe Theater, and a new play, Seven Favorite Maladies of Ludwig van Beethoven, commissioned by the Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice, Harrison is working with Broadway composer Jimmy Roberts (You’re Perfect, I Love You, Now Change) on a Hollywood musical, Rex & Lilli.
New Plays, Volumes 1 and 2 include some of Harrison’s most recent work for the stage, and is soon to be followed by a third volume. The dozen or so plays comprising these collections – out of the 42 that have been performed, on both sides of the Atlantic – were premiered between 2009 and 2014, in most cases by The Woodstock Players at the Byrdcliffe Theater in Woodstock, New York. The Byrdcliffe Theater is a venue with a history of nurturing originality – Joanne Woodward and director José Quintero, who was to revive Eugene O’Neill’s reputation, are among the notable talents who have worked there – and The Woodstock Players have continued this tradition.
George Quasha wrote of their work:
“The particular combination of history, fantasy, psychological (even psychic) complexity and humor, in the richest play of subtle language, calls up from historical depths an ancient possibility: a theater that transforms the viewer.”
Praise for Carey Harrison’s plays:
The London Times: “A minor miracle, the way Harrison stitches together the goonish and the gorgeous”
The Observer: “Glorious, full of sensual exotica”
The Listener: “A superb mix of slapstick, surrealism and tragedy”
The New York Times: “A model of judiciousness, densely packed, skillfully blended”
Samantha Suleiman: “A transnational, transtemporal, transpatial voyage, delicious and delightful and divine”
Crichton Atkinson, The Book of Ideas: “I have not seen an audience participate with theater like this since I was a child visiting London.”
Dog’s Mercury (2014)
Seven Favorite Maladies of Ludwig van Beethoven (2014)
I Am Your Own For Ever (2013)
Alice in Rehab (2013)
My Name is Peter van Wyck (2013)
I Won’t Bite You: an Interview with the Notorious Monster, Dorothea Farber (2013)
Rex & Rex (2013)
Hedgerow Specimen (2012)
Midget In A Catsuit Reciting Spinoza (2011)
Magus (2010)
Bad Boy (2009)
Scenes From a Misunderstanding (2009)
Breakfast With Stalin (2008)
A Cook’s Tour of Communism (2008)
Hitler in Therapy (2005)
Richard’s Feet (2003)
East of the Sun (2000)
The Psychiatrist’s Tale (1996)
A Call From The Dead (1995)
For A Son (1995)
The Empress Wu, The Concubine Wang (1994)
A Walk in the Bois (1993)
Self-Portrait With Dog (1993)
St. Last Thoughts Upon Paules (1993)
Newton In Love (1992)
The Water-Cure (1991)
Mr Pope’s Toilet (1990)
From the Lion Rock & the Sea Voyage Trilogy: Plays for Radio (1989)
I Killed Jacques Brel (1984)
Who’s Playing God? (1983)
A Suffolk Trilogy: 3 Plays for Radio (1982)
A Night on the Tor (1980)
Visitors (with Jeremy Paul) (1980)
A Short Walk To The Stars (with Jeremy Paul) (1979)
I Never Killed My German (1979)
Madcap (from Pirandello) (1976)
Manoeuvres (with Jeremy Paul) (1974)
The Bequest (1971)
Shakespeare Farewell (1970)
Lovers (1970)
Wedding Night (from Gert Hoffmann) (1969)
In a Cottage Hospital (1969)
Servant of Two Masters (from Goldoni) (1978)
Twenty-Six Efforts at Pornography (1968)
Dante Kaputt! (1966)
Buy New Plays, Volume 1 on Amazon.
