Drama. Poetry. Performance Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Hybrid Genre. Introduction by Amina Cain. A quietly heartbreaking play that grounds epic themes–unabated longing, violence and imperialism, and the bond between mother and son–in the small ways we hurt and love one another and decide where to go on vacation. In BRIEF CHRONICLE, BOOKS 6-8, Alexander Borinsky delivers a play in a single column that reads as poetry, critique, and philosophy for the practice of everyday life in America.

BRIEF CHRONICLE, BOOKS 6-8 is a remarkable creature of our shattered and shuttered time. Borinsky’s theater examines everything that it encounters–including the various artifices of theater itself, i.e. character, costumes, boxes, supposed emotions (real or imagined), action as it would have its way, place/s, and all the supposed ends and means of the theater making apparatus–with a scrupulous but loving attentiveness. There is no one quite like him writing and making theater today.–Mac Wellman

If the world feels a little unknowable after reading this play, if you feel unknowable to yourself, how do you talk about that, how do you narrate what it was like? Still, I will tell you what I thought about when I finished Alexander Borinsky’s BRIEF CHRONICLE, BOOKS 6-8 though it changed when I read it again, and it may be different for you too. Intimacy. The many ways (sometimes strange or uncomfortable) in which it’s possible to know another person. What it means to appear. What it means to live. When the play opens, it seems we are encountering something that has already been happening, without us, and this is surprisingly relaxing (we are allowed to be ‘late’). The ghost will arrive, but in a sense we are making an entrance too. This is not just about the one who watches and the one who is watched; in Borinsky’s play, those formalities have been emptied of their meaning. We are all here in this room for whatever will unfold.–Amina Cain

3 Hole Press is a small press bringing new audiences to new plays in printed formats. The Press publishes titles that expand notions of what a play is, the possibilities that emerge for drama on the page, and the connection between plays and other mediums. Interdisciplinary by design, these books belong outside the drama section.