Download or read book Interview with the Sphinx: A Play written by Jack Matthews and published by Personville Press. This book was released on with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative & immensely irritating comic play, the Sphinx from ancient Greece is interviewed in modern times as though she were a celebrity pop star. The problem is, she never answers any questions -- never directly anyway. Instead she prefers just dishing the dirt on everybody. ON HOMER: "I never was exactly sure which one Homer was. I'm positive he wasn't the blind one, though; that was just a silly story they started telling a few centuries later". ON OEDIPUS: "Eddie was terribly conceited, you know … of course he was smart and handsome and, oh, just had a way of carrying himself that impressed everybody. In spite of his foot." Bit by bit the Interview learns that what happened in Greek legend didn't happen exactly the way Sophocles described it. Fortunately, the Sphinx offers the Interviewer another riddle ... if only he could figure out what exactly it is! Part Tom Stoppard, part Monty Python, part Oscar Wilde, this play by Jack Matthews combines philosophical paradoxes with fast-paced verbal pyrotechnics. It offers the perfect antidote to people who remembered ancient literature as nothing but stuffy and melodramatic characters with hard-to-pronounce names. In 2013 an audio version of this one act play was produced by Personville Press. This ebook contains the complete script used for the 2013 audio production plus another expanded two act version of the same play. This expanded two act version is titled "Dr. Freud and the Sphinx," and includes Florence Nightingale and Sigmund Freud characters (who serve as the Greek chorus). "Mr. Matthews is a master of prose conversation and deadpan charm. He is ironic, cool, and shrewd, and he writes a lucid prose." (Tom O'Brien, New York Times)