Plays by Lynne Alvarez : Later Plays & Selected Poems

This collection includes three full-length plays: ESPERANZA RISING, ROMOLA AND NIJINSKY, and THE SNOW QUEEN, and selected poems. ESPERANZA RISING: A young girl, born into the Mexican aristocracy, is uprooted, transplanted, and re-grown in alien soil. ROMOLA AND NIJINSKY: The story of world-famous Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky's shipboard romance and marriage to Romola DePulsky. THE SNOW QUEEN: A fairy tale for adults with danger, adventure, and love, based on the classic Hans Christian Anderson story. ESPERANZA RISING "ESPERANZA is a story about the past that pushes into the present. In the 1930s, a well-to-do Mexican adolescent is cluelessly callous toward the hardships of the family's household help. When her landowner father dies, her life is upended. Esperanza travels several rungs down in class, winding up in a U S migrant workers' camp ... What makes ESPERANZA most winning is that a story so susceptible to bathos is told without guile or artifice. What this little girl loses in privilege, she gains in empathy and experience." -Rohan Preston, Star Tribune ROMOLA AND NIJINSKY "When the house lights came up following the curtain call, the transfixed opening-night audience refused to leave, its applause not diminishing, till [the actors] emerged for another bow." -Michael Feingold, The Village Voice THE SNOW QUEEN "Lynne Alvarez's THE SNOW QUEEN a delicate, perfumed script produced with exquisite artistry. The New York playwright, who has been living in Dallas the last two years, has created a song of innocence and experience. Youthful innocence suffers, no doubt, when it comes up against the world's cruelties. But it learns wisdom that way, if it chooses to ... Perhaps some folks might find THE SNOW QUEEN just too rarified and artful to constitute a good time. Magic theater isn't for some. I pity them. -Lawson Taitte, The Dallas Morning News