The Trustus Plays

The Hammerstone, Drift, and Holy Ghost

Jon Tuttle

The Trustus Plays
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Distributed for Intellect Ltd

Jon Tuttle

176 pages | 8 halftones | 7 x 9 | © 2009
Paper $30.00 ISBN: 9781841502243 Published March 2009 Not for sale to UK, Europe, Australia, or New Zealand

The Trustus Plays collects three full-length, award-winning performance texts by American playwright Jon Tuttle. Each play was a winner of the national Trustus Playwrights Festival contest and was then produced by the Trustus Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina. The Hammerstone is a comedy about two professors aging gracelessly, Drift is a dark comedy about marriage and divorce, and Holy Ghost is the story of German POWs held in the camps in the American south. Jon Tuttle provides an introduction to the plays, and Trustus founder and artistic director, Jim Thigpen, offers a preface describing Tuttle’s work within the context of the Trustus theatre’s dedication to experimental, edgy social drama.

"Jon Tuttle is a writer of great humor, compassion and humanity. He writes about people in the midst of discovering each other and, in turn, themselves. Like a fearless spelunker of the human condition, Tuttle digs his way into the lives of his characters, and explores the dangerous gaps between them – surveying the nooks and crannies that divide the known from the unknown, and the said from the unsaid. What he finds there are stories rife with bracing complexity and an aching sadness."– David Lindsay-Abaire, Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama


"Jon Tuttle's perceptive and fearless plays reveal a theatrical voice deserving to be heard. Whether exploring how men and women wound each other while yearning for connection (Drift), the temptations of cynicism and limits of idealism in modern education (The Hammerstone), or the gap between American ideals and American history (the insightful and brilliant Holy Ghost), Tuttle's plays are filled with juicy theatrical scenes underlined by wisdom that's both brutal and compassionate." – Rich Orloff


"With these plays, Jon Tuttle beautifully accomplishes several things: he gives us characters with dark souls whom we are compelled to care about; he gives those characters dialogue that is at once kitchen-sink gritty and classically poetic; and he causes us to pay rapt attention until the final curtain--not out of morbid curiosity, but out of a suspicion that we'll learn something useful and hopeful about our world. I can easily picture Jon Tuttle and David Mamet having murmured discussions on the pitcher's mound, wherein Mamet learns a thing or two, nods gravely, and returns to his position behind the plate" – Phil Ward


"While the genres vary, all of The Trustus Plays revolve around a protagonist who must ultimately make a choice 'freighted with ontological implications.' Tuttle, not unlike Brecht, admits that he himself had to search his own work to find its ultimate meaning."


Contents
Preface, by Jim Thigpen
 
Through the Dark, Glassily: an Introduction
 
The Hammerstone
 
Drift
 
Holy Ghost
 
Holy Ghost from Page to Stage - and Back, by Dewey Scott-Wiley
 
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