Tales of the Lost Formicans and Other Plays

“One of the best playwrights our country, and our language, has produced.” –Tony Kushner

“Quirky, disturbing, and inexplicably beautiful theatrical poetry.” –Cary M. Mazer, Philadelphia City Paper

“Congdon writes like a woman possessed.” –Nels Nelson, New York Daily News

An immensely inventive and challenging writer, Constance Congdon is one of America’s finest playwrights, endowed with great compassion, keen insight and an unfailing comic sensibility. Throughout the plays in her first collection, she demonstrates a range rare in writers in any age, from a somber meditation on life in the post-nuclear age (No Mercy) to madcap social satire (Losing Father’s Body), from an epic historical exploration of love and sexual identity (Casanova) to her most popular play to date (Tales of the Lost Formicans), acclaimed by William A. Henry III of Time magazine as “A travel guide to Middle America conducted by aliens from outer space… If not the best new play of recent years, surely the most imaginative.”

Constance Congdon’s plays have been produced throughout the United States and abroad. She has received playwriting fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, and is the winner of Oppenheimer/Newsday, W. Alton Jones and L/ Arnold Weissberger awards. Congdon, an alumna of New Dramatists, currently teaches playwriting at Amherst College.