AMERICAN NOTES

A kaleidoscopic, surrealistic overview of contemporary America, set forth in the bizarre, highly theatrical style which characterizes this writer s distinctive voice. Produced by New York s highly regarded Public Theater, the play employs brilliantly imaginative avante-garde techniques to highlight both the dreams - and delusions - which infuse and motivate our modern world. The play is made up of a series of concurrent actions, some set in a tacky motel, some elsewhere, involving a group of disparate but curiously related people. There is the young night clerk, Pauline, who studies her high-school English Lit notebook, while growing increasingly fearful of the unseen and unwanted suitor who lies in wait in the motel parking lot, a raucous carnival barker touting his giant crocodile, Bonecrusher, a pair of seedy bar denizens who occasionally break into song, a dim-witted handyman, Chuckles, who performs pointless errands, a deranged scientist who believes that he is in contact with creatures from outer space, an abandoned woman who waits restlessly for a lover who will probably never return, and a mysterious drifter, Faber, who, somehow becomes the catalyst which fuses all these divergent elements into a cohesive, and often wildly funny whole. And, in so doing, makes the play both an encapsulation of the American myth and, at the same time, a telling comment on what is right - and wrong - with this myth. ... it has a cumulative, atmospheric effect, tantalizing our senses at the same time it creates a haunting iconographic world ... AMERICAN NOTES is itself sui generis - bearing the unmistakably original signature of Len Jenkin. -The New York Times [AMERICAN NOTES] is a kind of anti-OUR TOWN. The weird backwater in which it s set is a little surreal and a lot seedy, populated by nighthawks, drifters, pimps, and hucksters. -Chicago Reader Twice as ingeniously written as any play in town ... -The Village Voice ... a mythic vision of America ... -Drama-Logu