A Welcome Review of Kevin Killian's Stage Fright: Selected Plays from the San Francisco Poets Theater

Kevin Killian's plays were published this year by Kenning Editions, as you may know. A new review of the publication from Charles O'Malley is up at Lambda Literary. Stage Fright: Selected Plays from the San Francisco Poets Theater includes plays Killian wrote from the 1980s to the 2000s, notes O'Malley. "Most were performed, either as a part of the San Francisco Poet’s Theater or in later festivals. Yet, as these works were written for reading or for readings (that is, in the mind’s eye or aloud in salons), reading them in this volume gives the plays the same attention." More:

...These plays, and the poet’s theater tradition, embrace the quotidian, they celebrate that which is amateur. Killian writes that he hoped audiences would come away from his plays thinking: I could do that! And as he asks: “Isn’t that the best kind of work, something generative?”

The plays in Stage Fright argue for a theater that can respond to the moment as quickly and efficiently as a poem, a sketch, a song, or a slap-dash piece of cultural criticism. In elapsing the time needed for writing, revision, and production, these plays speak vibrantly of their moment of creation.

Killian’s style is caustic and wonderfully bizarre. His writing flings about a queerness that lands somewhere between Charles Ludlam and Robert Chesley, with a dash of Nora Ephron along the structuring styles of Thornton Wilder. These plays are achingly specific. Loving references to San Francisco and disparaging comments about Marin abound (they will perhaps will not compute to readers outside the Bay Area). Figures like Liza Minelli and Lauren Bacall show up, and you better know their most famous films if you want to get the jokes. In the play Island of Lost Souls, stage directions describe William S. Burroughs as “sinister novelist, wife murderer,” Sunny von Bülow as “heiress, diabetic,” and Julie Andrews as “restless British superstar.” She’s restless, you’ll come to learn, in her pursuit to create a musical version of On the Road. Sounding like Ludlam yet?

Read the full review at Lambda Literary.