Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I have the pleasure of talking to Wallace Sean, the author most recently of a book

of essays published by Haymarket Press.

And as I was reading these essays, I was gathering some of all as Sean's plays together,

among them the designated mourner and Marie and Bruce and Aunt Dan and Lemon. I had seen him perform the fever at one time.

It became, I blundered into the fact that he's written a very recent play,

so recent that while it's been performed in London,

it hasn't been publicly performed in America, called Grasses of a Thousand Colors.

It's published by the Theater Communications Group.

And when I read it, I fell in love with it.

And I thought, well, we don't often talk about plays or essays on bookworm, but what a pleasure it would be to talk about this particular play, grasses of a thousand colors, especially in relation to some of the essays.

He writes essays about reality and about theater, which he refers to as the dream world.

And this play is very much, it seems to me, a dream play, yes?

Yes, this play is proceeding by laws of logic that are not the normal ones in the play.

It has, I'm afraid, the logic of dreams, although I'm not sure I remember my own dreams well enough to really compare.

That could be simply a useful cliche, a way of saying that the logic doesn't follow the logic that we use in daily life.

And yes, it is either a dream or it is mythological.

...