Stanley Nelson’s plays have enjoyed over 100 productions in New York, London and college and community theaters throughout the US, and have been lauded by sources as diverse as The New York Daily News and the Village Voice.

His Poe: From his Life and Mind was cited in Best Plays of 1971. He edited The Scene, four popular anthologies of plays from early Off-Off Broadway.

 \His poems have appeared in over 50 publication and in several dozen anthologies. He has been awarded theThomas Wolfe Poetry Award, and his Immigrant, an epic poem in four volumes, has been hailed as “one of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth century.”

Nelson’s collection  of experimental fiction, The Unknowable Light of the Alien, was honored with the Small Press Book of the Year Award.

Mr. Optometrist

One-act  Comedy        1m 1f

Stanley Nelson likes to test the boundaries of Theatre of the Absurd and its associations with the surreal. It sometimes seems Laurel and Hardy have wandered onto an Ionesco landscape.

In Mr. Optometrist, a woman on her lunch hour simply wants to have a loose screw on her eyeglasses tightened. The Optometrist is pompous, arrogant, seductive, bullying, manipulative. He quickly draws her into an unsettling phantasmagorical scenario of the cold war, local politics, oedipal references and impending menace. She resists and, at the same time, is irresistibly complicit. The Lady herself, who begins as a picture of innocence, become coquettish, flummoxed, menacing, always under a guise of naiveté. Both seem to have a screw loose, and even the little screw becomes a sexual innuendo.

An ever-present aura of camp, so pervasive to theatre of the sixties, provides a fluffy cushion for the mayhem.

$5.99 paperback