The
script
is available at all Samuel French stores in New York City, Los
Angeles,
Toronto and London,
and
at www.samuelfrench.com.
In New York City it can also be purchased at
|
250
W. 40th Street |
18
Washington Place |
It
can also be bought online at amazon.com
and www.stageplays.com
(Europe)
Playwright
Jeffrey Stanley's
script for his moving Off-Broadway play Tesla's Letters
has been
released by Samuel French. Samuel French highlights the play as
among
the year's "best dramas from New York, Los Angeles, and London stages"
in its 2000 Basic Catalogue of Plays and Musicals for the New
Millennium.
The two-act, 4-character drama set in 1997 in the Balkans is about an
American
who sets out to find Nikola Tesla's doomsday device only to discover
that
a machine is not required. Electrical pioneer Tesla, a
Croatian-born
Serb, was Thomas Edison's biggest rival. Daisy Archer, a
bright-eyed
PhD candidate, arrives in Belgrade thinking she has permission to view
letters at the Nikola Tesla Museum. She is not prepared to face
the
museum's director Dragan, a Serb with family in Croatia, who has needs
of his own and who strikes a dangerous bargain with Daisy. If she
agrees to visit a war-torn part of Croatia to determine whether Tesla's
birthplace has been destroyed, she will be given access to Tesla's
letters.
Daisy learns that the bargain is more complicated than it appears, and
that she is a pawn in a larger game. <>
"Is there a more
timely
play in New York? This well-written, well-constructed drama
constitutes
pertinent, intelligent, instructive...and often witty and suspenseful
theatre.
Although the play is a drama of ideas about war and peace, the exercise
of humanity and the uses of science, it is a measure of its appeal as
theater
that its first act ends not with a whimper but a bang."
-Lawrence Van Gelder, The New
York Times
<>"The writing offers
historical
depth and insight on a subject the defies simplified soundbites and
media
clichés."
-Charles McNulty, Village Voice
<>"It
is a
captivating mystery up until the very end. The intricate
writing is filled with intellectual arguments
and verbal word-play about historical events, not
unlike a Tom Stoppard
play."
-Jennifer
MacBain, Show Business Weekly
<>
<>
