Giovanni Vignale

Odradek and Billy Bass Drink to the End of the World Giovanni Vignale

Suspended in space and time, the characters of these plays are pure abstractions, speaking devices, neither alive nor dead, in fact, not even human. The collection begins with the otherworldly lyrical "Denshosha"-a tribute to the nameless victims of self-righteous violence-and continues with the mounting drama "The Lover," where desperate desire crashes against the boundaries of the possible. These two plays share a Japanese lineage complete with chorus, music, and cruelty. The sense of humor escalates in the dark farce "How to Drive a Cop Crazy," an inverse Kafka story in which, exceptionally, the authority loses, and culminates in the fierce absurdism of the title play, where any semblance of plausibility is lost. Odradek and Billy Bass-two human artifacts who happen to be the only survivors of the apocalypse, promptly begin to rewrite history casting themselves as the new masters of the universe.