The Gold Standard: A Book of Plays

by Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch's plays take what is best in opera, in Japanese Noh and Kabuki, in Renaissance and Jacobean drama, in every odd and suggestive dramatic form from the miracle plays to Jarry's Ubu Roi, and make of it something remarkable and new.
Among his plays that have been staged Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, The Red Robins had a celebrated New York production, with sets by Red Grooms, Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher, Rory McEwen, and Roy Lichtenstein. The Construction of Boston, put on first as a play starring the three artists who did the sets - Niki de Saint Phalle, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jean Tinguely - was later an opera, with music by Scott Wheeler. George Washington Crossing the Delaware, a short classic of avant-garde theater, has been performed all over the country.
This collection also contains new plays, among them Edward and Christine, a moving work about adventure and passion that takes place in about one hundred scenes.

263 pages, Hardcover

First published October 22, 1996

About the author

Kenneth Koch is most often recognized as one of the four most prominent poets of the 1950s-1960s poetic movement "the New York School of Poetry" along with Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and James Schuyler. The New York School adopted the avant-garde movement in a style often called the "new" avant-garde, drawing on Abstract Expressionism, French surrealism and stream-of-consciousness writing in the attempt to create a fresh genre free from cliché. In his anthology The New York Poets, Mark Ford writes, "In their reaction against the serious, ironic, ostentatiously well-made lyric that dominated the post-war poetry scene, they turned to the work of an eclectic range of literary iconoclasts, eccentrics and experimenters."

Fiercely anti-academic and anti-establishment, Koch's attitude and aesthetic were dubbed by John Ashbery his "missionary zeal." Ford calls him "the New York School poet most ready to engage in polemic with the poetic establishment, and the one most determined to promote the work of himself and his friends to a wider audience." Koch died of leukemia at age 77, leaving a legacy of numerous anthologies of both short and long poems, avant-garde plays and short stories, in addition to nonfiction works dealing with aesthetics and teaching poetry to children and senior citizens.

Reviews

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really liking these plays of Kenneth Koch so far. So fluid, playful, and spot on. The value of money??? Santa Claus versus the Easter Bunny??? Come on in. Now this is fun!!!