The King’s Confessor

The middle of the 20th century is littered with American authors known as much for their ennui as the liver pickling it gave rise to. The greatest rogue among them, perhaps, was the now-nearly-forgotten playwright Martin Thrush. Born on Easter Sunday, 1912, exactly one week before the Titanic met its icy fate, Thrush was educated at an all-boys parochial school in Queens. He dropped out, however—or was kicked out, the biographical record remains unclear—and ended up working for a time as a cobbler’s apprentice in Greenwich Village, just around the corner from The Cherry Lane Theatre. It was there that Thrush fell in love with the stage, and, in the decades that followed, he worked feverishly on the plays that would solidify his reputation as one of the great geniuses of the avant garde counterculture fomenting at that time.
     Only one of Thrush’s works, The King’s Confessor (1940), was staged in its author’s lifetime. Written during a spasmodic episode of intense religiosity, the play wrestles with questions of faith and doubt so earnestly that it could not but provoke scorn among Thrush’s bohemian consorts. It is for that reason, undoubtedly, that the remainder of his corpus did not see the light of day. In addition to The King’s Confessor, Thrush completed two more plays, The Uncanny (1954) and Roanoke (1959), and left The Devil and Robert Johnson—his final work, often considered his masterpiece—unfinished when he disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1962.
     For more than six decades, the plays of Martin Thrush have been out-of-print and thus lost to generations of readers who have been deprived of the complex, startling, and often touching writing of one of the 20th century’s most original men of letters. Now, thanks to a generous grant from the Panteleimon Trithemius Literary Endowment and the dedicated work of renowned critic and playwright Kris Christopher, Thrush’s goddaughter, these magnificent plays will be made available for the first time by the only press bold enough to print them.