Photos by Salem Krieger

Karen Malpede, playwright, writer, co-founder Theater Three Collaborative. Her page.

My forthcoming book

Last Radiance

to be published by Vine Leaves Press in October, 2025

When my partner in art and life, George Bartenieff, died in 2020, I wrote, like many writers, through my grief. The result is a book, Last Radiance, a memoir of ideas and of the people I knew who shaped and defined the theater and the cultural life of nonviolent resistance to war and bigotry. This is a tradition with roots in the Romantics, Transcendentalists, Abolitionists and the pacifist antiwar movement, and many extraordinary people, Joseph Chaikin, Jack Gelber, Grace Paley, Noam Chomsky, Allen Ginsberg, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Kathleen Chalfant make cameo appearances in this book which is also held together by another theme, cancer. My father died of cancer when I was 19. My dear friend, Julian Beck, and a mentor in the feminist movement, Freedom Rider and writer, Barabara Deming, who I introduced to Julian with whom she had much in common, died of cancer, too. George died of complications from multiple myeloma. My first play, A Lament for Three Women, was about cancer, and my play Us, directed by Judith Malina in which George starred was also, in part, about cancer. Julian, Barbara and George were fascinating, brilliant people; the work they did at the end of their lives and the ways in which they approached their deaths are subjects of Last Radiance. George was a hidden child in Nazi Germany, and he knew firsthand the kindness and treachery of ordinary Germans. As he came closer to dying, he became more obsessed with his early years. He was writing a memoir. Last Radiance tries to complete the work he left unfinished, and it discovers things about his childhood he did not know. Most of all, this book is a love story. As I came to learn as I wrote and mourned, the depth of one’s grief is commensurate to the wealth of one’s love.

Excerpts from my book:
Dark Matter Women Witnessing

Other News

Here are some links and some quick news:

Wikipedia - Karen Malpede

Egret acting editions: Blue Valiant and Other Than We.

Also, Troy Too may be having another production in CA.

And, I have a commission to write a play for a theater in Santa Monica.

I am researching and writing about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, reproductive freedom and the creative life.

Vine Leaves Press