Dear Friends,

Last Radiance my love letter to the cultural avant-garde and pacifist left. This is my love letter to George Bartenieff, Julian Beck and so many more. This is my love letter to all of us who have sought a better world, and live to make that happen. Last Radiance is personal, revelatory and, I hope, inspiring.

Please consider pre-ordering the book as this will be a step toward having it the noticed. Here is the link to the online store. https://vineleavespress.myshopify.com/

With thanks and love

Karen

Pre-order

Advance Praise:

"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 The End of the Myth, America, America

"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

Celebrating the Life & Legacy of George Bartenieff

Coffeehouse Chronicles/#166
October 1, 2022 at 3 pm
LaMama ETC, The Ellen Stewart Theater, 64 East 4th St. NYC

Link to event

George Bartenieff, as Robert, in "The Beekeeper's Daughter," written and directed by Karen Malpede, 2016, photograph by Beatriz Schiller

Link to George’s Memorial Page

The World Premiere Film of Blue Valiant

We are proud to present our first film. Originally staged at Farm Arts Collective, May 29 & 30, 2021.

"Blue Valiant" is TTC's newest, a play written by Karen Malpede especially for our colleague and collaborator, Kathleen Chalfant, and George Bartenieff. A first, private, reading on zoom of "Blue Valiant" was (I will let audience members speak): "a gorgeous treat", "absolutely brilliant," "really wonderful to hear this beautiful play come alive" "George was wonderful. Kathy as usual is a goddess", "amazing reading of your beautiful play". Releasing this play during the pandemic, on zoom, felt utterly right. Now, can we do it outside, this summer, on a horse farm, where it is set, with the full piano score, and images, of which we had just a part? There is something about this particular play, though written before, that feels as if it fits this particular unimaginable moment.

Dixon Place Presents:
Experiments and Disorders

A presentation we did for Dixon Place.
Click here to go to Youtube.

A NEW BOOK

Plays in Time by Karen Malpede

Plays in Time has 3 "5 star" reviews on Amazon.
"As an actress, playwright, journalist, activist and award winning environmentalist I want to say that Karen Malpede's plays are works of genius, connecting us to the global nightmares of cruelty, war, greed. Through the very specific conflicts of unique, complex and vivid characters. the stories of our times, such as climate change and the aftermath of 9/11, unfold. These are not dialectics but revelations of the human condition. With influences of Greek classic drama and myth, written with Shakespearean beauty, and wonderfully imaginative stagecraft, she has created a body of work for the ages. This is not the facile, self-referential, emotionally vapid immature drama produced today (with very rare exceptions such as Lynn Nottage's Sweat, or Dominic Orlando's Danny Casolaro Died for You). This is real theater. Get this book, produce these plays laden with dream roles for actors who know their craft. Audiences will revel."--Lee Roscoe

Buy The Book

UK Book Launch
October 21, 2017 at 5:00 pm

University of Surrey, with Dr. Patrick Duggan, Alia Butt, and Karen Malpede

US Book Launch
December 11, 2017 at 6:30 pm

Segal Theater, CUNY-Graduate Center, with Marvin Carlson, Cindy Rosenthal, George Bartenieff, Kathleen Chalfant, Christen Clifford, Karen Malpede, Najla Said. Readings from the four plays and a panel discussion. Music by Arthur Rosen. FREE

MISSION STATEMENT

Theater Three Collaborative, founded in 1995, creates, develops and produces new poetic-language, character-driven plays on pressing social issues.

We surround our plays with Festivals of Conscience, talks and talk-backs by experts in the field the play addresses.

Telling the Truth One Play at a Time

Our last decade of plays remain newsworthy: Prophecy, 2006-2010 (Berlin, London, New York) about the cost of our wars to veterans and civilians; Another Life, 2011-2013 (Kosovo, Gerald W. Lynch, Irondale, Theater for the New City, NYC; London) the only American play to tell the truth about the U.S. Torture program; and Extreme Whether, 2013-onward, our family drama about Climate Change which needs to be more widely seen. We work on minuscule budgets to deliver productions of the highest quality.