Book excerpt: Ulysses S. Grant faces mortality and his own failing memory in this “exciting and vivid” play by the Tony Award-winning author of Six Degrees of Separation (Michael Feingold, Village Voice). Arthur Schlesinger calls A Few Stout Individuals “a political extravaganza.” This latest work from award-winning playwright John Guare, author of House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, addresses ideas of history and memory, fame and ignominy, reason and insanity with his trademark Guare imagination. In a Fifth Avenue brownstone in 1880s New York, former president and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant is penniless, dying of throat cancer, and attempting to finish his memoirs while he’s cajoled and pestered by everyone from his wife and children to Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) and, by way of drug-induced hallucinations, the Emperor of Japan. A thoroughly original play that explores the nature of memory, ambition, and history itself, A Few Stout Individuals is “unmistakably the product of Mr. Guare’s exotic yet very American imagination” (Ben Brantley, The New York Times).