New Ishmael Reed play

Today's blog post is brought to you by synchronicity.

A few minutes ago, after the power came back on in our house (there's a winter storm moving in), I got a new email from Gary Acord, and he mentioned that he had recently begun reading Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. Reed was one of Robert Anton Wilson's favorite writers, and the book is name-checked at the beginning of Illuminatus!, as I mentioned here.

I then clicked on a brand-new email from Nick Helseg-Larsen, and discovered that he had sent me a link to this article, from TheaterMania about a new plan by Reed. Excerpt:

The Final Version, a new play by MacArthur Genius Grant Award winner Ishmael Reed, is currently running at Nuyorican Poets Café through January 19.

The play follows Communist Party-sponsored black writer Lee Ransom, who in 1939 chooses to publish his novel, Let the Red Flags Unfurl, with an uptown publisher under the condition that he cut two of his radical characters. Twenty-six years later, he must decide again whether or not to publish his novel when a publishing company expresses interest in printing the original version.

I was going to post about something else, but how can you argue with the universe?