Overview

""A bracing and true book that teaches us new ways to be alive."" Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize winning author, The End of the Myth Cancer looms over this memoir like a modern god of petrochemical reckoning, but its brutality is softened-again and again-by the luminosity of love and artistic creation. After the protagonist's violent and seductive father dies a harrowing cancer death, she leaves home determined to become an artist. Her path takes her through the reckless, libertine world of the New York avant-garde and into the deeply committed realm of the ecofeminist pacifist left. There, she bears witness to the bright deaths of Julian Beck and Barbara Deming, and finds her life partner: the brilliant actor-producer George Bartenieff. Together, they create boundary-pushing theatre that confronts the biggest issues of our time-war, climate change, collective historical trauma-while unearthing George's past as a hidden child in Nazi Germany. Even as they battle the ferocity of cancer, they continue to make vital, final works of transformation. This memoir traces lives lived at full intensity: radical love, fearless art, deep community, and the painful beauty of last things. It invites readers into the underworld of grief and dying, offering lessons in presence, remembrance, and the urgent need to confront a failing medical system with courage and care.

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9783988321763

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Reviews

""Illness is a metaphor for our anguished world, as Karen Malpede's harrowing and haunting, but also joyful, Last Radiance makes clear. Malpede's memoir of a life lived in the cultural avante-guarde is a rare book that forces us to sit with death and despair, and in the process teaches us new ways to be alive. We've become numb to the word cancer, as we have to war. Malpede's honest, limpid prose forces us to feel again, not merely to assign meaning to sickness-our own and that of our loved ones-but to see sickness in its social totality. A bracing and true book."" Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize winning author ""A wonderful, important book about the theater and about love."" Kathleen Chalfant, award winning stage and screen actor ""Karen Malpede's Last Radiance is a stunning work-a book that somehow manages to be a coming of age story, a memoir of deep love and searing loss, and a sweeping cultural history of New York City avant-garde theater and activism spanning from the 1960s to the present. Malpede's voice is strong and her eyes are clear; she examines her own history through a well-earned, unafraid lens, looking at everything, knowing fully what is important. If only we were all this devoted-to love, to art, to writing, to seeing the world so clearly. A deep, moving work; Malpede's story will stay with me."" Nellie Herman, author, The Cure for Grief, Season of Migration ""Lucky you to have found this book by playwright Karen Malpede! Here in lies a deeply human secret history; a poetic memoir of the American avant-garde. This is a world of magic and passion that only someone who lived it can transmit. No dry academic theories here! This is a jewel box of lived politics, lived aesthetics, lived poetry and lived art that is disappearing. Savor it! Carry the history. Penny Arcade, performance artist George Bartenieff lived an exemplary life in the theatre, using his great gifts as an actor not just for his own fulfilment, but always, practically and imaginatively, for the fulfilment of others."" David Hare, playwright ""Karen Malpede achieves the writer's dream-a simultaneity of unheard past, screaming present, and cresting future where ""language could hurt"" but ""absolute kindness, fierceness of vision, and commitment to act... bring grace into a world through luminous gaze and deep attention."" Only Malpede's own words from this astonishing book match the intensity of its bravery and truth. Although cancer and grief are its alleged subjects, its subterranean magma erupts to command us to ""wonder at life every moment"" and to be equal to it."" Rita Charon, Founding Chair, Narrative Medicine, Columbia University ""What an important book it is in several different ways-as a memoir of cancer (and indictment of cancer treatment and healthcare in general), a biographical portrait of George Bartenieff and others, a memoir of a marriage, and a history of poetic theater."" Joan Wickersham, National Book Award Finalist ""Truly eloquent and very, very moving. The writing is a form of poetry, only much less abstract and the metaphors are all tangible. The description of being alive while dying made me cry. It's such a brave testament to what all of us are terrified of and it's full of love and softness, too."" Avra Sidirpoulou, Director, Persona Theatre, Greece ""Fascinating and Moving. Karen Malpede takes us on a searingly personal tour of her life in art at the beating heart of the avant-garde political theater movement based in New York City from the NChaikin, and George Bartenieff, she bears passionate witness to the roots of today's experimental theater and makes us feel we've lived through it ourselves, while navigating us through a perilous dance of cancer treatments, poised on the edge of life and death."" Jay O. Sanders & Maryann Plunkett, New York City-based actors

Author Information

Karen Malpede is the author/director of twenty-two plays produced in the United States and Europe. Her plays have been translated into Albanian, Arabic, French and German. She co-founded New Cycle Theater in 1978 and co-founded Theater Three Collaborative in 1995 with George Bartenieff and Lee Nagrin. Play anthologies: 4 by Malpede plus an Intervention, Plays in Time: The Beekeeper's Daughter, Prophecy, Another Life, Extreme Whether, A Monster Has Stolen the Sun and Other Plays. Editor/contributor: Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays, Women in Theater: Compassion and Hope, Three Works by the Open Theater, People's Theater in Amerika. Her short fiction, nonfiction and drama is published in many periodicals, including: The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Theatre Quarterly, American Theater, Theater Topics, Confrontations, Torture Magazine, The Typescript, Kairos, Courtship of Winds, and The New York Times. OBIE award I Will Bear Witness. McKnight National Playwrights fellow. CAPS, New York State, playwriting fellowship. She has taught theater, playwriting, ecofeminism, and environmental justice at Smith College, New York University, and John Jay College-CUNY. MFA Columbia University. Visit: www.theaterthreecollaborative.org.

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