Mr. Universe: And Other Plays

BOMB Magazine
"He mixes fire and ice in varying doses like a mad literary alchemist...often surreal but searing."


Nelson Taylor, Bomb, Fall 1998
Jim Grimsley is a dark, witty Southern writer. Making no apologies for being tough, Grimsley dives headlong into heated contemporary issues such as religion, family, and same-gender sex. His powers are dialogue and description, which are always free of judgment. In his debut collection of plays, Mr. Universe & Other Plays, he mixes fire and ice in varying doses like a mad literary alchemist....Introduced by the likes of a Reynolds Price or a Kaye Gibbons, each play presents an often surreal but searing allegory for the tepid and shallow flow of status quo America. Grimsley began writing plays while waiting for his debut novel to sell. Turned down by every major house in the U.S.,Winter Birds was finally published in Europe to critical acclaim, and when eventually published here, raked in the esteemed Sue Kaufman Prize awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Although Grimsley insists he is a novelist first (he's published three now) and a playwright second, there's no denying that he's a force to be reckoned with on both fronts.


Book Description
George Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Playwright; Bryan Prize for Drama by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In this collection, critically acclaimed novelist Jim Grimsley reveals his great gifts as a playwright in four powerful, award-winning plays presenting different worlds in collision and convergence. In "Mr. Universe," the rescue of a mute bodybuilder from the gritty streets of New Orleans by a couple of drag queens brings out the best and worst in them. In "The Lizard of Tarsus," an imprisoned Jesus (called J.) is interrogated by an ambitious follower, Paul of Tarsus. In "The Borderland," neighboring families representing two very different social classes are brought together during a storm. And in "Math and Aftermath," the two worlds of pornography and nuclear testing collide during a film shoot in the Marshall Islands. These plays (introduced by Romulus Linney, Reynolds Price, Kaye Gibbons, and Craig Lucas) demonstrate the differences that are matters of perception; together they establish Grimsley as a dramatist with imagination and nerve. A STAGE AND SCREEN BOOK CLUB selection.


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Here is award-winning drama that peers into the nature of human conflict with wit, risk, and a sense of adventure. From the gritty streets of New Orleans, where a muscle man is rescued by two drag queens, to a prison cell, where Jesus is interrogated by his ambitious disciple, Grimsley's plays ask what happens when divergent worlds cross. What happens, for instance, when a yuppie couple and their poor rural neighbors are unexpectedly forced to address their differences - and their similarities? What happens when members of a film crew shooting an adult movie on the beach of Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, confront their own fears on the eve of the first hydrogen bomb explosion?


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