Karen Malpede, playwright, writer, co-founder Theater Three Collaborative. Her page.

Kirkus Review

A playwright reflects on a life of art and activism and her loved ones’ struggles with cancer in this memoir.

Malpede’s mercurial father, Joseph, was prone to bouts of rage, and his “astonishingly scatological tongue,” which she credits with helping her learn to write, only grew sharper as he wasted away from terminal cancer. She cared for him during the end, and that experience prepared her to care for three other loved ones, all artist-activists like her, battling the same disease: Barbara Deming, Julian Beck, and George Bartenieff, the man who was her partner for 35 years. Malpede met George in 1987—she was 42 years old and he was 54—and fell deeply in love with his charming mix of “European gentleman” and “vagabond.” The author tenderly depicts their extraordinary life together, marked by love and artistic work—in 1995 they cofounded the Theater Three Collaborative. In 2019, George was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, and in 2022, at the age of 89, he died in the author’s arms, a loss conveyed with searing emotion. This is an eclectic memoir; Malpede chronicles, sometimes in excessively granular detail, her life as an artist, activist, and lover. At the core of the remembrance is the deathly specter of cancer, and the heroic ways in which her loved ones managed to live joyfully despite its ravages. “The luminosity and courage of late-stage cancer patients, as the flesh pulls taut to the bone, the only word to describe this is awe—they exude awe for the tortured life they are still fiercely living, and we, awe for them.” This is a moving reflection on the power of both art and love in the face of death, both poignantly encapsulated by the indomitableness of George’s “boy-child-self” to the very end.

An affecting recollection that thoughtfully considers human mortality.

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 avant-garde 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

Recent writtings:
Mourning the love of one’s life

Other News

Here are some links and some quick news:

Wikipedia - Karen Malpede

Egret acting editions: Blue Valiant and Other Than We.

Also, Troy Too may be having another production in CA.

And, I have a commission to write a play for a theater in Santa Monica.

I am researching and writing about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, reproductive freedom and the creative life.

Vine Leaves Press