The Revisionist

By Jesse Eisenberg and John Patrick Shanley

A play by the multitalented actor: “[Eisenberg] has a wry ear and a knack for unsentimental poignancy that keeps The Revisionist emotionally compelling.”—USA Today

Though he first became known for his acting in films ranging from The Squid and the Whale to The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg has also emerged as an acclaimed literary talent—a regular contributor to the New Yorker and a highly praised playwright.


In The Revisionist, his second play, young writer David arrives in Poland with a crippling case of writer’s block and a desire to be left alone. His seventy-five-year-old second cousin, Maria, welcomes him with a fervent need to connect with her distant American relative. As their relationship develops, she will reveal details about her postwar past that test their ideas of what it means to be a family.

This “tightly structured, deeply human play about the truthful mess of human experience” (Exeunt Magazine) had its world premiere at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York in spring 2013, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Vanessa Redgrave and directed by Kip Fagan.


“A rewarding account of cultural collision that yields unexpected reflections on the centrality of family in our lives—whether we idealize them or take them for granted…As a playwright, Eisenberg’s intentions seem clear. He takes a critical swipe at himself, and by extension, his entitled generation.”—Hollywood Reporter

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9780802192738

Book preview

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The Revisionist

JESSE EISENBERG

The Revisionist

A Play

Introduction by

John Patrick Shanley

V-1.tif

Grove Press

New York

Copyright © 2013 by Jesse Eisenberg

Introduction copyright © 2013 by John Patrick Shanley

Don’t Let It Bring You Down (page 66), words and music by Neil Young. Copyright © 1970 by Broken Arrow Music Corporation. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved, used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

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Printed in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN:

978-0-8021-2233-9

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9273-8

CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that The Revisionist is subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and all British Commonwealth countries, and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, and the Universal Copyright Convention. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

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Grove Press

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INTRODUCTION

How to read a play? I’ve done it enough to tell you how I do it. I read with a degree of fatalism. It’s like visiting family. Occasionally, the experience is rewarding, but always, suffering is involved. You’re trapped in somebody else’s house or head, their engine of despair or uplift. Face-to-face with a wise uncle, ignorant nephew or enigmatic aunt, you wonder how you fit in, or if you do. You see yourself in an uncomfortable light. You’re a hapless intruder. If the play is good, at some point you realize you’re in it. Shit. This is MY house.

Buckyballs began bouncing in my head scarcely moments into the production of The Revisionist I saw some weeks back. A character named David, a young man who is utterly unable to be present, gets trapped in a very small space with an old woman named Maria, who is ONLY present. As in all the best stuff, the encounter is rich because each character highlights the other.

David is a product of life in America now, a new kind of Peter Pan who flies because he can’t land. He can’t grow up because he can’t commit to any one life long enough to do so. His entire method of operation consists of running, deflecting and avoiding, by every means possible. In a bold stroke, Jesse Eisenberg not only wrote the play, but played the part. His performance physically demonstrated the emotional truth of this guy; he literally spent a goodly amount of his time onstage finding a way, again in a very small space, of staying off the floor. He was habitually PERCHING on something: a bed, the arm of a chair or couch. When that tactic proved impossible, he resorted to tranquilizing himself with marijuana or liquor.

Meanwhile, his counterpart, Maria, a Polish woman in her seventies, wants the one thing the young man can’t give. She wants company. She wants to get to know him, to be with him, to share food and time with him. Her values are all human.

She’s thrilled because this young fellow is her cousin, and he has elected to visit her. She has been suffering from isolation and longs to connect. Her plight is such because she lost her European family in the Holocaust. David is her American family. But Maria wants family in the European sense, and David can’t begin to fulfill that need.

Now, the institution of family in America has been under assault for a long time, but these days there is an additional malaise. Individuals are now losing their connection to humanness itself. The extraordinary onslaught of virtual communication and social media has allowed us to cultivate something unhealthy in our psyches: the desire NOT to be touched. Not only