The script of a play or film...

The script of a play or film is rather like a sex manual: It may be illuminating, but it cannot capture the sheer pleasure of the thing. Still, since the screenplay has replaced the novel as the work-in-progress in the bottom drawer of nearly every aspiring writer in Los Angeles, I suppose that a recent flurry of published plays and screenplays will find a certain appreciative readership. By far the most readable of the lot is Aunt Dan & Lemon by Wallace Shawn (Grove Press: $6.95; also available in hardcover, $15.95), a dark and disturbing exercise which suggests--in the words of the playwright--that “a perfectly decent person can turn into a monster perfectly easily.”

Aunt Dan & Lemon, last year’s hot controversy of Broadway and the West End, is a minuet of outrageous ideas and frustrated passions as performed by two women--the reclusive and vulnerable young Leonora (or Lemon), and Aunt Dan, the eccentric older professor who was her mentor and, in a way, her seductress. “I’m a very sick girl,” Lemon announces in the very first scene, and the metaphor for her illness is a wholly unhealthy intellectual flirtation with Nazism and the Holocaust. “Today, of course, the Nazis are considered dunces, because they lost the war, but it has to be said that they accomplished a great deal of what they wanted to do,” Lemon prattles. “They were certainly successful against the Jews.”

Such monologues prompted revulsion and censure when the play was performed on the stage, which is precisely what Shawn intended. In a curiously rambling and inarticulate essay that accompanies the script, “On the Context of the Play,” Shawn explains that the moral abyss into which his characters have slipped, and not too reluctantly, is a threat to us all: “If we live from day-to-day without self-examination, we remain unaware of the dangers we may pose to ourselves and the world,” Shawn writes. “But if we look into the mirror, we just might observe a rapacious face . . . . And maybe most of us look a little bit like Hitler, that ever-present ghost.” Of course, he delivers the same sermon in the play itself, and much more effectively, through the chilling but fascinating example of Lemon, whose malady is the secret malignancy of our Western civilization, and Aunt Dan, a charming miscreant and the straw woman of Shawn’s argument.

The Unseen Hand and Other Plays by Sam Shepard (Bantam: $7.95) is a collection of 14 early works by the celebrated triple-threat man of stage and screen. These one-act plays, mostly conceived and performed off-off-Broadway in the tumultuous 1960s, are the potent (and portentous) but uneven outbursts of an artist of boundless energy and ambition. “I wrote all the time,” Shepard recalls in a brief preface. “I’d have six or seven ideas for plays rolling at once. I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with the flow of material flowing through me. Needless to say, I wasn’t very good company.” Shepard was encouraged by the ease of mounting a stage production in those heady days: “Anybody could get his piece performed, almost any time,” Shepard explains. “If there wasn’t a slot open at one of the cafe theaters or in the churches, you could at least pool together some actors and have a reading. You could go into full-scale rehearsals with nothing more than an idea or half a page of written text.”

Indeed, much of the work collected in “The Unseen Hand” reflects the formless energy and sheer exuberance of improvisational theater. (“Biscuits in the sun. And ya’ run. And it’s fun. Ya’ have a gun. It’s yer own. Ya’ don’t care. You can even shoot a bear. If you have any hair.”) Today, the mature and accomplished Shepard concedes that the plays of his youth are curiosities rather than classics: “Basically, without apologizing, I can see now that I was learning how to write,” he confesses. Hanif Kureishi is a young Anglo-Pakistani essayist, playwright and screenwriter whose well-received little film, “My Beautiful Laundrette,” has been playing the Southern California art theater circuit. Now the shooting script, accompanied by a long autobiographical essay about the uneasy juxtaposition of English and Pakistani cultures in contemporary Great Britain, are presented in My Beautiful Laundrette and The Rainbow Sign (Faber & Faber: $8.95). The script is problematical, especially if you have not seen the movie; a play is, after all, a literary work that lends itself to reading, but I found the cinematic shorthand (“142. EXT. STREET. DAY.”) and the crabbed scene-setting and stage direction (JOHNNY holds GENGHIS like a lover”) to be distracting and unilluminating. Interestingly, the screenwriter defers to the film technician in rendering his story: Kureishi calls for a character to glance at a speeding train, and “if this is technically possible, he sees TANIA sitting reading in the train, her bag beside her.” By contrast, Kureishi’s essay about growing up in London as the child of an English mother and a Pakistani father--the experiences of racial, cultural, sexual and political malaise that inspired the film--is far more vivid, articulate and assured.

The Marriage of Maria Braun: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Director, edited by Joyce Rheuban, (Rutgers University: $10; also available in hardcover, $25) is the fourth volume in the Rutgers Films in Print Series. The film was an elaborate commentary on the values and aspirations of postwar Germany, and a sly homage to the “women’s films” of Hollywood in the 1930s. Here we find much more than a bare screenplay--a fully annotated transcript of the film as actually produced, notes on the shooting script, a critical biography of the late director, an interview with him, a collection of reviews and commentaries by scholars and film critics, a filmography and bibliography, and an authoritative essay by film historian and Fassbinder collaborator Joyce Rheuban. Through its critical prose and careful scholarship, the book not only complements the motion picture but vastly enhances and enriches it.

Titles reviewed in “Paperback Originals” have been published in softcover only or in simultaneous softcover and clothbound editions.