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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays

Djuna Barnes

Edited and with an Introduction by Douglas Messerli

Digital Only

A Sun & Moon title.

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Although little has been written about Djuna Barnes’s drama, she wrote some 19 short and longer plays and was one of the early members of The Provincetown Players (which included Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Edna St. Vincent Millay); later she contributed essays, interviews, and drawings to the Theatre Guild Magazine. This book contains all the short plays written by Djuna Barnes, including the plays published in newspapers and magazines.

Certainly many of the plays collected here are strange works. As Alexander Woollcott quipped about a production of “Three From the Earth,” “The play... is enormously interesting, and the greatest indoor sport this week is guessing what it means.” The plays here are not quite so impenetrable, however; it is only that, in their mix of J. M. Synge realism and Oscar Wilde affectation, the language and structure often are at war. The energy that war produces is far more fascinating than hundreds of Broadway plays seamlessly molded into sleeping-pill substance and form. Barnes’s plays creak with originality and all the confusion of a young, brilliant mind attempting to understand the universe.