Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise: Selected Plays

Harry Kondoleon has said his plays are "sad, scary, funny." Though his work has been compared to that of Joe Orton and Oscar Wilde, John Guare and Christopher Durang, his acute and elegant voice has from the first been distinctively his own.

Kondoleon's tragicomedies are peopled by extremists, their behavior bizarre. And yet these curious characters are driven by the most familiar of passions. Abandonment and betrayal define their pasts, shadow their present. They are needy and lonely and full of desire. They seek transcendence, and this impossible, fundamental longing takes forms both common and strange.

These plays are not only jet-black comedies. They are fairy tales, fables, passion plays, masquerades. Kondoleon's intensely theatrical sensibility is, finally, romantic. He sees the contemporary world clearly; he also sees other worlds: prior, within, beyond.

This volume also includes: Christmas on Mars, The Vampires, Slacks and Tops and Anteroom.