Playwriting Commons^™

Anywhere But Home: The Life And Work Of Barrie Stavis, Daniel Larner

Fairhaven Faculty Publications

Barrie Stavis Th e American playwright Barrie Stavis is a paradox in his own country. “A prophet without honor” may exaggerate the case, but Yugoslavian critic Dragan Klai'c does see Stavis as a subtle but important kind of prophet, whose work precedes European efforts to reestablish a theatre of commitment:

"to separate values, moral principles, and simple human concerns from compromised ideological projects. Disappointment about European developments, the sense of danger caused by racism, fanatical politicians, and ecological nightmares, bring theater back as a field of argumentative, activist aesthetics. Nothing old-fashioned, romantic, 68ish in all that—only a sense of moral …

An Interview With Barrie Stavis, Daniel Larner

Fairhaven Faculty Publications

Barrie Stavis lives in an apartment in New York City’s upper east side. He and his wife Bernice are surrounded by green plants, their collection of paintings and sculpture, and Barrie’s collection of duck decoys. What follows is a starkly reduced version of five days of very intense talk (the transcript runs 186 pages)—talk which, as Stavis said repeatedly, led him into painful, difficult, and exciting territory, and led him to see connections between his life and work he had either not seen, or not explored before.