Three Plays

About the Book

In addition to being a distinguished printer, teacher, poet, and prolific writer of journals, Claude Fredericks is also a playwright, and has written over the years more than a dozen plays, some finished and performed, some unfinished and in the process of being finished and performed. His three most successful plays were performed off-Broadway in the Fifties and Sixties. Julian Beck and Judith Malina at The Living Theatre produced Fredericks’s The Idiot King in 1954, and in 1961 The Artists Theatre, directed by Herbert Machiz and John Bernard Myers, produced Fredericks’s On Circe’s Island and A Summer Ghost. In 1965, A Summer Ghost appeared in the first volume of Robert Corrigan’s New American Plays, published by Hill and Wang, and The Bennington Review included On Circe’s Island in its issue for the winter of 1969, but The Idiot King has never until now been published, and the three plays have never appeared together in a single volume.

About the Author

Claude Fredericks was born in Missouri in 1923. He attended Harvard College in the early Forties, where he studied with Langdon Warner, John Finley, and Walter Clark, and later, in New York in the late Forties, he founded The Banyan Press, where for many years, in New York and in the country in Vermont, he printed by hand in limited editions unpublished work by Gertrude Stein, John Berryman, James Merrill, and many other writers. Plays of his were performed in New York by Julian Beck and Judith Malina at The Living Theatre and by Herbert Machiz at The Artists Theatre as well as by other groups elsewhere. For many years he taught Greek, Italian and Japanese literature, at Bennington College. He is, at present, with the collaboration of Marc Harrington, engaged in editing for publication in its entirety the long journal he has been writing almost without intermission since he was eight years old. The manuscript of this journal, some fifty thousand pages in length, makes up part of the vast archive of the papers of Claude Fredericks at the Research Institute