Lammy Spotlight: 'The Myopia and Other Plays by David Greenspan'
The Lambda Literary Foundation this week announced its finalists for the 25th Annual Lambda Literary Awards—"Lammys" for short—and three titles from the University of Michigan Press have made the list. The Lammys are given each year to celebrate the best books on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender subjects, including both fiction and non-fiction and drawing in nominees from major publishing houses, small publishers, academic presses, and more. Last year, Peggy Shaw's A Menopausal Gentleman: The Solo Performances of Peggy Shaw took home the gold in the LGBT Drama category. This year's nominees from the Press are The Myopia and Other Plays by David Greenspan, edited by Marc Robinson, in the LGBT Drama category; Sara Warner's Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure in the LGBT Studies section; and Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics by Ramón H. Rivera-Servera in the same category. We'll be spotlighting each book in the coming weeks, beginning today with Myopia.
The Myopia and Other Plays collects five plays by David Greenspan, a playwright and actor whose intense, semi-autobiographical work often deals examines issues of memory, family, doubt, and sexuality. Edited by critic and scholar Marc Robinson, the plays collected here explore the motivations for erotic and aesthetic expression.
"When Greenspan crosses lines beyond which others won't go," Robinson writes in his introduction, "he does so not with the radical's defiance but with a gesture back toward a code of manners he has no desire to forsake." While Describing Greenspan as "irreverent, even outrageous," Robinson also notes that "his wit doesn't set the tone unopposed ... He cuts the ironist's knowingness with sincerity, and holds back from rancor in favor of less revealing drollery, even diffidence."
Read five of four-time Obie Award-winning playwright David Greenspan's plays in The Myopia and Other Plays, and watch for the Lambda Literary Award announcements in June!
