Plays

Best known for her vivid, dreamlike paintings and darkly humorous prose, Leonora Carrington was also a brilliant playwright whose dramatic works are as subversive and sly as anything we have come to expect of her. The first collection of Carrington’s plays to appear in English, this volume gathers plays from her early years in Paris to her later work in Mexico City, and include several that have never before been translated.

A young woman falls in love with her rocking horse in the coming-of-age-tale Penelope—a production of which was famously staged in 1961 by Alejandro Jodorowsky. In Flannel Night Shirt, a corpse lies in a pool of blood while ghostly figures in flannel night shirts frolic in the basement. And in the ecofeminist satire Opus Siniestrus, an old woman—the sole survivor of a virus that kills only women—battles the patriarchy to prevent it from claiming the last ostrich egg in the world.

Reminiscent of the films of Maya Deren and David Lynch, these are stories of repressed desires and forbidden pleasures, of myths and mysticism, magic and mayhem, from one of the most singular and imaginative minds of the twentieth century.