Mr. Universe: And Other Plays

by Jim Grimsley

“One of the most intelligent writers working today.” - Kaye Gibbons With three critically acclaimed works of fiction--Winter Birds, Dream Boy, and My Drowning--Jim Grimsley established himself as a gifted, accomplished novelist. The Philadelphia Inquirer called him “one of the finest Southern novelists to appear in a long, long time.” Now, with these four plays, collected for the first time, Grimsley shows that he is, as Romulus Linney puts it in his introduction, “a writer of many seasons.” Here is award-winning drama that peers into the nature of human conflict. 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 converge. Each play challenges us to view otherwise opposing worlds and characters not in terms of how they contrast but in terms of what they have in common. Collected together, they form a powerful body of work by a talented and important writer--one who was awarded the Bryan Prize for Drama by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and was named Newsday’s George Oppenheimer’s Best New American Playwright. A STAGE AND SCREEN BOOK CLUB Selection

Genres: Plays, Drama

270 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Jim Grimsley published a new novel in May of 2022, The Dove in the Belly, out from Levine Querido. The book is a look at the past when queer people lived more hidden lives than now. Grimsley was born in rural eastern North Carolina. He has published short stories and essays in various quarterlies, including DoubleTake, New Orleans Review, Carolina Quarterly, New Virginia Review, the LA Times, and the New York Times Book Review. Jim’s first novel Winter Birds, was published in the United States by Algonquin Books in the fall of 1994. Winter Birds won the Sue Kaufman Prize for best first novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. He has published other novels, including Dream Boy, Kirith Kirin, and My Drowning. His books are available in Hebrew, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese. He has also published a collection of plays and most recently a memoir, How I Shed My Skin. His body of work as a prose writer and playwright was awarded the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005. For twenty years he taught writing at Emory University in Atlanta.

Reviews

[Not Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Play.

Just speaking on Mr. Universe, seen live at UA in Spring of 2020. Just okay. Sets up and relies on tropes (gender, sexuality, and race) and then literally falls on the sword with them.