"It began one afternoon nearly 30 years ago in the basement of the Rare Books Library at Tuskeegee University. Looking through a microfilm roller at the papers of Jean Toomer, an African-American novelist of the 1920's Harlem Renaissance, I scrolled pass the first page of a handwritten copy of Georg I. Gurdjieff's ballet Struggle of the Magicians on the roller. Not even typewritten. I scrolled back to it." So begins the author's notes to the first of a four-volume collection of plays documenting the evolution of a self-taught amateur playwright from a know-nothing to a homespun veteran of 22 productions, mostly Shakespeare, with six non-Shakespeare productions flowing from his own pen. For all that evolution, the author sees he's still a know-nothing, just one with a little more experience. So why inflict one more volume of printed anything, let alone four, on a print-weary audience of readers? Go make a movie. The reason is simple: Starting with this volume, "Collected Plays" documents a 30-year journey of self-revelation and discovery by the author: "Things as they are, myself as I am." Each play has been crafted to communicate this revelation to readers. Some do it better than others. The first two volumes are plays written with sanity checks removed from the virtual realities they construct, being full throttle exercises in magic realism. The third volume seems more grounded, but isn't really, being two history plays focusing on turning-point events in the lives of Cervantes and Socrates. The fourth hop skips through the mind of the child in each one of us to land on the hidden inner meaning of six modern fairytales. Dare to read them.