The complete plays, including never before published work, from one of the major writers of the twentieth century.
The complete plays, including never before published work, from one of the major writers of the twentieth century.
Kenneth Koch was a prominent American poet of the New York School and one of America’s most diversely talented writers. The Banquet celebrates his work as an avant-garde playwright, gathering 144 plays, ten screenplays, and five librettos spanning more than five decades of experimental work. Koch’s dramatic work was produced in New York—both Off Broadway and Off, Off Broadway—and in opera houses in the United States and Europe. Witty and provocative, and drawing on poetry, improvisational comedy, satire, Japanese Noh and Kabuki theater, Renaissance drama, and miracle plays, Koch’s work has a deft, humane touch, ranging from the playful to the sublime.
The Banquet succeeds in spades, giving us an entire 'world of pure experience,' to borrow William James’s phrase, one that is just waiting to be brought to life." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"Some writers excel in more than one form . . . the 600-plus pages of The Banquet suggest that the late poet Kenneth Koch had two right hands."—New York Observer
"[T]he plays abolish time and space. . . If we lived in Koch’s Arcady, the text seems to ask, might we live forever?" —Poetry Magazine
“[These plays] are as funny and inventive as Koch could be. Count him among the few to move beyond Gertrude Stein in establishing alternative performance texts.” —Rain Taxi Review
"These are bursts of charming joy, mystery, surprise and delight animated by a love of language and a deep belief in its possibilities. . . The Banquet is the perfect title for this collection, a book to be read and reread." —BODY
