Word: jonesism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Jones likes to claim that he turned to writing only when the Theater Center recruited more and more workers, leaving less and less for him to do. A Texas Trilogy was composed mostly after theater hours.
Now, after a lifetime's apprenticeship in obscurity, Jones has suddenly found himself beset by fame. "This has been a weird year," he says, and the coming year will be even weirder as he develops, willy-nilly, into the latest candidate for great American playwright.
In this undisciplined enthusiasm, Jones has also been mentioned in the same breath with Tennessee Williams and William Inge, whose early plays found first production more than 20 years ago at the Dallas Theater Center. Jones himself suggests other comparisons. While playing the stage manager in Our Town, he confesses...
The Inge of, say, Picnic may be the level at which Jones hits at present. Like Inge, he has a paradoxically lyrical feeling for ordinariness-for hopes and disappointments on the banal scale of "a small frame house in a small framed town."
Future Lack. "I don't write about now," Jones confesses. "I write about yesterday." The characters in A Texas Trilogy look back as compulsively as the author-to their youth, to World War II, or even World War I. They seem doomed to speak and think in the past...