The Trustus Plays: The Hammerstone, Drift, and Holy Ghost(Playtext)

The Trustus Plays collects three full-length, award-winning performance texts by American playwright Jon Tuttle. Each play was a winner of the national Trustus Playwrights Festival contest and was then produced by the Trustus Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina. The Hammerstone is a comedy about two professors aging gracelessly, Drift is a dark comedy about marriage and divorce, and Holy Ghost is the story of German POWs held in the camps in the American south. Jon Tuttle provides an introduction to the plays, and Trustus founder and artistic director, Jim Thigpen, offers a preface describing Tuttle’s work within the context of the Trustus theatre’s dedication to experimental, edgy social drama.

About the Author :
Jon Tuttle is Playwright-in Residence and Literary Manager at Trustus Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina, and Professor of English at Francis Marion University. His fourth Trustus Play, The Sweet Abyss, will premiere in August, 2009.

Review :
"Jon Tuttle is a writer of great humor, compassion and humanity. He writes about people in the midst of discovering each other and, in turn, themselves. Like a fearless spelunker of the human condition, Tuttle digs his way into the lives of his characters, and explores the dangerous gaps between them - surveying the nooks and crannies that divide the known from the unknown, and the said from the unsaid. What he finds there are stories rife with bracing complexity and an aching sadness." - David Lindsay-Abaire, Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama "Jon Tuttle's perceptive and fearless plays reveal a theatrical voice deserving to be heard. Whether exploring how men and women wound each other while yearning for connection (DRIFT), the temptations of cynicism and limits of idealism in modern education (THE HAMMERSTONE), or the gap between American ideals and American history (the insightful and brilliant HOLY GHOST), Tuttle's plays are filled with juicy theatrical scenes underlined by wisdom that's both brutal and compassionate." - Rich Orloff, Playwright, New York "With these plays, Jon Tuttle beautifully accomplishes several things: he gives us characters with dark souls whom we are compelled to care about; he gives those characters dialogue that is at once kitchen-sink gritty and classically poetic; and he causes us to pay rapt attention until the final curtain--not out of morbid curiosity, but out of a suspicion that we'll learn something useful and hopeful about our world. I can easily picture Jon Tuttle and David Mamet having murmured discussions on the pitcher's mound, wherein Mamet learns a thing or two, nods gravely, and returns to his position behind the plate." - Phil Ward, Director/Actor, Hollywood, CA "Jon Tuttle is a playwright who understands the animal nature of dramatic tension-whether that tension is made taught and frayed in a university faculty office, a bar or a prisoner re-educationA" camp in South Carolina. Love is important in his plays, and it tips between the civilized and the carnal. Tuttle is a very musical playwright whose work often musically carries us through driving melodiesA" and syncopations-both in scene structures and in character voices. And-as with the best musical artists-when the last notes are struck, the last chord sounded, we find ourselves feeling reflective: wondering about loss, pondering loyalty, grieving the failures of human aspiration." - David Kranes, Playwright, Novelist and Founding Artistic Director, Sundance Playwrights Lab