Necessary Ends - Cohen, Marvin

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Résumé :
NECESSARY ENDS involves two couples who tangle in a philosophical farce about love, language, sex, time, and death. A collaboration with the director James Milton, it was privately auditioned to producer Joseph Papp, with Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory, Angela Pietropinto, and Gretchen Van Riper in the four roles. The term 'character' was coined with Marvin Cohen in mind. A gentle observer of the unpredictable and slightly absurd, Marvin has a fondness for mankind that is unmistakably his own. Sometimes I think of him as a comedian-chronicler standing at the center, his head turned slightly toward your line of speaking to accomodate his hearing aid. NECESSARY ENDS is the sum of these parts, as Marvin positions and repositions people within relationships, that ever-aimed ear to the pun and odd bits of conversation, as though he's walking slowly through a cocktail party. The strength of his writing stems from his baroque sense of humor and his ability to see both the world and himself as wonderfully delightful miscreants. Joseph Papp, from his Introduction to Plays from the New York Shakespeare Festival...

Biographie:
Marvin Cohen (born July 6, 1931), is the author of a number of episodic novels, plays and verse, a book on baseball, and several collections of shorter pieces-stories, dialogues, parables, and idiosyncratic essays. His work has also appeared in more than 100 publications, from the experimental to the mainstream, including: Ambit, Antaeus, Assembling (a collection of otherwise unpublishable writings), The Beat Scene (alongside Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Corso), Chelsea, Fiction, The Hudson Review, Thomas Merton's Monks Pond, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, The Transatlantic Review, The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York City. He has described himself as one who has risen from lower-class background to lower-class foreground. He studied art at Cooper Union but left college to focus on writing. He supported himself with a series of short-term jobs including mink farmer and merchant seaman. He later taught creative writing at various New York colleges. He is married and currently lives with his wife in Manhattan.