Edmond (1982)

In the course of 23 rapid scenes, Edmond’s eponymous (anti)hero leaves the marriage that bores him and embarks on a rapid down-ward progress through the underside of urban America that will lead to murder, incarceration and rape. The play is set in New York, a city the playwright has compared to hell; the protagonist’s surname is Burke, inviting ironic comparison to Edmund Burke (1729–97), the Irish-born British statesman renowned for his opposition to the French Revolution. Henry I. Schvey neatly summarises the implication: Edmond dramatises the breakdown of ‘the partnership between the individual and the social order’1 and the consequences of the untrammelled individualism graphically expressed by Teach in American Buffalo.