You can cast your vote for the 2015 Readers’ Choice Award online at www.literary-arts.org/voteOBA! The winner will be announced at the Oregon Book Awards ceremony on April 13 at the Gerding Theater at the Armory.
Between now and April 13, we will be featuring all of the 2015 Oregon Book Awards finalists.
2015 Oregon Book Awards Finalist
Absurdist Or, Is It? by Sandra Stone
Category
Drama
About the play:
Absurdist or Is It is three inter-related plays: POOF, An Imperfect Place to Dispose of Flies, and What Everything Is.
About the playwright:
Sandra Stone’s working life incorporates the writing of other writers. She proposes concepts and literary text for the interior of public buildings and the landscape. Her book Cocktails With Breugel at the Museum Cafe won an Oregon Book Award in 1998, later selected as one of 150 outstanding books of poetry by Oregon poets. Her poem “Snow Whippets” was named the 2010 winner of the Lucille Medwick award for a single poem on a humanitarian theme by the Poetry Society of America, as well as the 2010 winner of the Campbell Corner prize for Distnguished Entry in the philosophic lyric and the 2008 winner of the Dana Award for linguistic invention. Her work has appeared in The Hudson Review, New Republic, SW Review, among other publications.
Excerpt from Absurdist Or, Is It?
The Directrice (to audience, peering)
Are you there? You! creaking seats…you commuters from outlying parts…lodgers tenants equilibrists curators aestheticians impresarios matineegoers soapbox orators little ones in velvet dresses…yes?
(pause) boys with folded paper aeroplanes
(pause) watchers at the kiosk…from the balcony the balustrade…juggling whatnots.
(peering into the audience) we need no more players. The auditions have been held. They are over.
(voice drops…stares balefully at audience) Did you buy tickets to this? To attend a little cirque of diversion.
(laughs in a sardonic way) Artifice…what a motley…you…yes…thank you yes for thinking of…we are all here if we think so…The Dandy lothario in mourning…the Mime who is maimed…myself (emphatic)…the Directrice. The unavoidable chorus.
(laughs with a trill that turns dark) You see? (words said togetherfast) This doxystrumpettrollopharlot…in search of the theater of illusion. Real? Of course real. Think of me as you will. I am immune to your perceptions. I say little I see much. (peering out again over the footlights) Shh-hh…you may hear and happen to hear for a long time after the crash of colliding clown cars an agape-jawed witness. What is that sound? Outcry from a crashed velocipede…a habitat…a crypt…music remotely resembling a…crying acrobat (drawn out) who does not appear to appear.
(Beat. Lights out.)
Read more about Sandra Stone:
“Sandra Stone: Living and Writing Poetry” Oregon Jewish Life
