Читать книгу Prodigal Son (TCG Edition) - John Patrick Shanley - Страница 7

PREFACE

In 1965 I arrived, a very troubled youth, at a private school in New Hampshire called Thomas More Preparatory School. Fifty-five boys were sequestered on a five-hundred-acre reservation on a mountaintop, for the purpose of education. I was from the Bronx, rather violent, a bit delusional, hungry for all kinds of things, and wild-eyed as a rescue dog. The teachers were all male save one, the headmaster’s wife, Louise Schmitt, and she taught one other boy and me in her home. Our subject was The Waste Land, and we studied it through a long winter and into the spring. I felt I didn’t understand the poem, and I didn’t care. I had seen a picture of T. S. Eliot, and I didn’t like the look of him. He wasn’t for me because I didn’t want to be him. That was how I judged poets then.

This play is my account of that time, the period during which my whole life was being decided. It is a true story for the most part. The changes I’ve made have been to simplify or make a point.

Most of the names remain unchanged, or only slightly altered. I wish you could have been there. I wish more generally that you could have shared my whole life with me, so we could discuss and compare. These plays I write are the best I can do to make that possible.

—JPS