Play Groups Books

When I read A Woman of No Importance, I realized that I have read it before. Though, not by the same author. It is drastically similar to the French Play Le Fils Naturel, by Alexandre Dumas, jr. Though, it was a really nice play, it dragged in many places.

I've just started re-reading this play and I think it is one of the most beautiful works Wilde ever wrote. Mrs. Arbuthnot's speech at the end of Act Four, beginning "men don't know what mothers are" is one of the most beautiful pieces I've ever read in Wilde. It's a very ironic speech, considering it was written by a man, but it shows what a wonderful insight into women Wilde had. The play is essentially about morality and the conflict between a person's own, private sense of morality and the moral values imposed on us by society. Ultimately, Mrs. Arbuthnot is the character who most deserves our respect, precisely because she refuses to buy into the moral values of those around her. Reading it, I can just imagine how it would be performed, I even find myself acting the play out in my head, such is the power and force of Wilde's dialogue. This is a truly beautiful work which I highly recommend

I received the news of the availability of this rarely seen or recorded early Wilde morality play with great joy; in reading along with it at home and pencilling out the many parts omitted by Mr. Jarvis (who also reads Lord Illingworth in a George Sands purr) I arose in outrage at the fraud.

We have come to expect in every recording of Oscar Wilde an undue amount of abridgement, from the BBC productions in The Oscar Wilde Collection (The Importance of Being Earnest / The Picture of Dorian Gray / An Ideal Husband / Lady Windermere's Fan) whose most recommendable selection lies in his revelations concerning stock swindling and insider trading among the aristocracy in An Ideal Husband, despite its own abridgement, to the absolutely unwatchable Hollywood versions such as The Importance of Being Earnest (a Victorian woman receiving a posterior tattoo??) and An Ideal Husband.

Unfortunately Mr. Wilde is dimly misremembered and taught as light drawing room comedy and curious one liners, but this is not the case, as those were only a pretty icing upon a very deep and substantial cake of scathing and indeed revolutionary social commentary, as Mr. Wilde was a subversive and secret Irish nationalist using the British aristocracy's own language to undermine it, much as the Cherokee warrior Jimi destroyed a colonialist and anglo generation with their own rock and roll in vengeance for the brutal destruction of his own nation. But that is certainly another story for another day.

The reality of Wilde's opus clashes with our prejudices and thus we trim Mr. Wilde to fit our own poor misunderstanding. But most incomprehensible in this, Jarvis's present butchery of the Wildean substance is the loss of the well known and immortal line: "Moderation is a fatal thing, Lady Hunstanton. Nothing succeeds like excess."

The safest thing for properly understanding this play is to read it yourself, for instance, in the very convenient Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins Classics).

We begin here with an abridged radio play presentation before a rather stiff and crusty live audience. The opening passages remind one of Kierkegard's famous reference to death by trampling by geese as we hear the indistinguishable squawks of women imagining they are producing the honking sounds of the British aristocracy of one hundred and a quarter years ago. Indeed the cacophony grows so profuse and confused that the abridger finds the need to not only excise the best of Wilde's social commentary, but also to insert inappropriately into the mouths of his characters the stage directions and other addresses in order to indicate who is speaking when and where. Sir John would never tell his wife (she of the many ex's) directly he preferred sitting with Lady Stutterfield (of the characteristic repetitious manner of speech). Please follow this with book in hand at all times in order to avoid wandering lost.

And these are not the only insertions, as Jarvis finds it necessary to add brutally the word Chicago where it is not indicated in the script, but only alluded to, as if we might not know now of the great Chicago Exhibition. He excises classical allusions the modern hearer might not have learned and thus would feel put out or looked down upon (Wilde had after all won prizes for classical studies throughout his educational career), as in the Archdeacon's reference to Dorcas, here exiled as now unknown. The archdeacon, by the way is the most listenable and talented of any of these actors. Jim Norton of the equally criminally abridged and overwrought recording of James Joyce's Ulysses (Abridged) here appears as the pretentiously preaching Kelvil, MP.

Jarvis's greatest crime of all is the alteration of the ending and the insertion there of the final word from Lord Illingworth, and the concurrent reversal of Mrs. Arbuthnot's response. If Jarvis wished to alter the ending, why not take up on the Lord's sincere offer to reform from the life he took up, lost after losing the lady of his love as she left him, and his sincere promise to treat Mrs. Arbuthnot with all due deference and respect and form a happy family with her and her son. That would be a modern ending satisfactory to all, if you must alter the ending, Mr. Jarvis.

Indeed, the overlooked mystery of this play is that the Lord is always pictured as the villian, yet he had indeed twenty years earlier offered to marry her, and his mother had indeed offered to support her, but she had fled, as she again does now, and yet she is the sympathetic character. What is Wilde telling us in a deeply inscrutable manner?

Please read this play in its entirety. At the time matters of child custody and single moms were not as common as now, and quite distractingly shocking, and so this play has much to tell us now. It is indeed a source of discussion for a great many moral and social and gender issues. Unfortunately Jarvis excises nearly all reference to the servants and their comings and goings and their direct mistreatment by the aristocracy, so all reference to class struggle is heard here only in pretty little speeches rather than in action.

In sum: READ THE BOOK!

When a woman has made a mistake she is the only one, with her son, to carry the burden. She is tainted forever and can only hide in some anonimity. But the play goes a lot further. The son becomes the target of the father who, unmarried, wants to find love in his son, and give his son the love he has never given to any one. But it is not that simple. The son has to choose between his father who provides him with an important ambitious position, and his mother who has been tainted forever by this man he does not know as his father yet, but not for long. But love will come in the way and will reveal the father as being forever unable to respect women. This man will try to soil the young woman the son is in love with. This will lead to a happy ending for the son and for the mother but a very unhappy ending for the father who will be deprived of his son. Is the punishment proportioned to the crime, because the father is exposed as a criminal, and in a way he is. Philandering is unacceptable in those days. The most intriguing aspect of the play is that this happy ending is brought by a young woman who is both American and a puritan. In a way Oscar Wilde, and we know the drama of his life, is advocating a real puritanism that is based on purity both on the surface and in depth. So he criticizes the hypocrisy of English victorian society because it advocates purity but practices (at least men can, but women cannot) any kind of unethical attitude or behavior. How can Oscar Wilde advocate such a position when he is what he is, hiding something that amounts to a crime in his society? We are also surprised by this salvation coming from an American woman. How can America be better than England? There is no easy answer. Maybe just the fact that in America ethics come first and do not accept any compromise or segregation against women. But is this true at the end of the nineteenth century? This play is very emotional but yet very unreal, surreal.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Perpignan

What a delightful book this is! If you are familiar with the hymn by Lesbia Scott, you will find out who the various figures mentioned are: Doctor, Queen, Shepherdess on the Green, Soldier, Priest, and the one Slain by a Fierce Wild Beast. The book on which this one is based was soft cover, illustrated by Judith Gwyn Brown in black and white, and was dedicated to the rebuilding of the New York City Church, St. Luke-in-the-Fields which had been destroyed by fire. The present hard back book is in color and has been dedicated to the rebuilt St. Luke-in-the-Fields church. It contains the original hymn tune.

I bought this book for my 3rd and 4th grade Sunday School class to teach them about the hymn and the saints it referenced. We had a wonderful time learning about Joan of Arc, John Donne, St. Martin of Tours and the others. It sparked excellent conversation about the communion of saints. It would also be an excellent gift for a child of any age.

This book is a lovely book. I think that the hymn that the text is based upon is especially fun for children in looking at saints in the past and the saints who are presently around us. However, I was very disheartened to see that the saints are all depicted as people with light skin. There are two people of color depicted, but one has to really look hard to find them in the crowd. Obviously, there is something wrong if we think that only light-skinned people are saints.

We have used this book for several years with 5th and 6th graders and they LOVE it. We don't even try to have them memorize their parts. We just give them copies of the script to use and highlight their parts. Everyone wants to be in the skits and we get a lot of laughs, while also experiencing truths from Scripture. We would like another book like this one with new skits!

I wish I had had athe opportunity to see more of a Table of Contents and inside content so I could know ahead what I might be able to use.

This book offers a unique way to start a conversation on many Christian topics. You will need several(2-6) characters for each skit, so either have a lot of puppets or a lot of volunteers ready before you buy it. Most of the skits are written for kids to act out, but I'm not sure that kids could memorize that much dialogue every week. Going with puppets would be best. Each skit will take approximately 5-10 minutes to put on and the setup is minimal.

The first time I read this script, I thought it would not be a good play at all. However, my school then put the play on, and I had the part of Frazier. Not only was it the most amazing experience of my life, I began to truly realize the amazing depth and excellence of this script. It is aboslutley amazing if directed well.

This is a play where the message was conceived first, and the play and characters were constructed around it. The result is a heavy handed didactic piece. One can endure heavy handedness, however, if the teaching is other than banal. In the case of this play, one only endures.

Well, I think you should read the play if you're going to review it. I mean, that is the point of a BOOK review, isn't it?

I both saw and read it, and onstage, one couldn't help but be exhilarated by the performance of Cherry Jones, one of our great American actresses. I saw an early version of the play in San Diego, then the slightly rewritten version in New York, and thought the changes made the piece stronger.

Tina Howe's voice and vision are spectacular here. Most people ignore her early, surrealist, work, and think of her as the female AR Gurney...writing about loopy wasps, such as in Painting Churches and The Art of Dining.

For those who know the early work (Birth and Afterbirth, The Nest), and who have followed her path in the last few years (prior to Pride's Crossing, she wrote One Shoe Off, which was a challenging and dangerous adult play, with more in common with Albee than Gurney), the play will fit in with themes she has explored and pondered for three decades or so.

A memory play, the 'present' is the life of the 90-something Mabel Tydings Bigelow, who swam the English channel in the 1920s. Her memory takes her back to her childhood, and the triumph of her youth, bucking the disapproval of her mother, and being ignored by her brothers, marrying a wastrel, and leaving the man she truly loved.

I sometimes wonder at the backlash at plays that focus on women and their lives, as they they aren't "important" enough to merit serious critical consideration. It seems to me it's a function of the sexism still inherent in the critical community, and while we've come a long way since the early 1900s, there are still many barriers yet to be broken down.

Everybody views holidays through their own prism. Paula Vogel, whose body of work substantially focuses on family trauma, sees Christmas through the prism of fights, resentments, estrangement, and sexual alienation. Nobody who's seen How I Learned to Drive will be surprised by the themes of this play. What will surprise them is the form.

This play takes elements of Bunraku puppet plays and Japanese Noh theatre and folds them into the sort of Christmas pageant a local church would stage, short on technical know-how and long on love. But instead of a celebration of Baby Jesus, this play dissects the way harsh words thrown out flippantly can come back into a person's life years later. Unforgiving and unsentimental, though not entirely without hope, Vogel here presents us a Christmas where three children make decisions that will resonate through the rest of their lives.

At an estimate, this play would probably run to about forty-five minutes in performance. But because of the special technical needs, the script runs a little longer than that might normally require. And because this play is so emotionally dense, reading it can be a downright brutal experience. I recommend breaking the reading into two or three segments, even though you could read the whole thing in ninety minutes or less.

In her notes, Vogel recommends not producing this play during December. I recommend also not reading it during that time. But if you are a lover of theatre--not Broadway spectaculars, but the spontaneous, human-driven theatre that got many of us into the art form to start with--this play wrings out the full range of human emotion and rewards you with the catharsis Aristotle loved so much.

A rich, difficult, but rewarding theatrical experience. Not for people weaned on the simplicity of TV, but if you are unafraid of the emotional possibilities of human performance, this play has a great deal to offer to audiences and producers alike.

My girlfriend and I read this in about an hour, and we were both impressed and moved by the clearly autobiographical expressions Paula Vogel shared and excercised. There is wonderful theatricality to be read (and seen if lucky) in the Bunraku-style puppets exemplifying the vision of her seminal anti-warm and fuzzy Christmas ride home with her brother, sister and parents.
In many respects this is a heavily therapeutic work, almost something Ms. Vogel had been needing to present. The urgency to share her painful upbringing and the deep wounds that helped carve herself and her siblings proves startling when imagining the three children as puppets, beholden to their parent's traumatic relationship, trapped in cars and apartments, suffering so greatly on a night others are seemingly so happy.
In conclusion it cannot be stressed enough how amazing it is to experience an artist's deepest, most painful and most loving visions of their life. It is what all artists strive for. In The Long Christmas Ride Home, Ms. Vogel shared her great love and pain, communicating them to me with pathos and wit.
It is to be noted that in the version I read-no the Dramatists Play Service one-there is a collection of letters she received from her brother Carl, which were as interesting and moving as the play itself.

"Mistero Buffo,"., alternatively titled "The Comic Mysteries," is a wonderful introduction to the irreverent, playful and imaginative world of Dario Fo, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. If "Mistero Buffo" has a shortcoming, it lies in the fact that it is merely a text and does not embody the vitality of Fo's imaginative work, which relies as much on performance as it does on literary content.

"Mistero Buffo" draws on the popular and comic tradition of the medieval mystery plays, as well as the tradition of the so-called "jongleur", or traveling comic and mime, whose performances provided a subversive counterpoint to the authority of Church, Monarchy and Lord. As the jongleur in Fo's piece, "The Birth of the Jongleur," reminds his audience: "I leap and pirouette, and make you laugh. I make fun of those in power, and I show you how puffed up and conceited are the bigshots who go around making wars in which we are the ones who get slaughtered. I reveal them for what they are. I pull out the plug, and . . . pssss . . .they deflate."

Written and originally performed by Fo himself, "Mistero Buffo" consists of a series of pieces involving mime, improvisation and performance art. The texts are fiercely anti-Church, anti-materialist and anti-authority, but they are written with a comic verve and playful sensibility that mark Dario Fo as a remarkably unique writer, director, and performer. Drawing on religious traditions, the pieces include Fo's modern take on Biblical stories entitled "Slaughter of the Innocents," "Marriage at Cana" and "Resurrection of Lazarus," as well as a series of short dialogues (entitled "Passion Plays") where Fo adumbrates the death of Christ as experienced by Mary. All of these pieces border on the blasphemous, subverting conventional pieties and unthinking reverence for established religion and replacing them with a kind of popular re-writing of Christianity, a revision which glorifies the common man at the expense of those in power. Not surprisingly, "Mistero Buffo," like most of Fo's texts and performances, is controversial and provocative. It is also, however, a short text worth reading for an insightful sampling of one of Italy's most remarkable literary and theatrical geniuses.

"Mistero Buffo", alternatively titled "The Comic Mysteries", is a wonderful introduction to the irreverent, playful and imaginative world of Dario Fo, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. If "Mistero Buffo" has a shortcoming, it lies in the fact that it is merely a text and does not embody the vitality of Fo's imaginative work, which relies as much on performance as it does on literary content.

"Mistero Buffo" draws on the popular and comic tradition of the medieval mystery plays, as well as the tradition of the so-called "jongleur", or traveling comic and mime, whose performances provided a subversive counterpoint to the authority of Church, Monarchy and Lord. As the jongleur in Fo's piece, "The Birth of the Jongleur", reminds his audience: "I leap and pirouette, and make you laugh. I make fun of those in power, and I show you how puffed up and conceited are the bigshots who go around making wars in which we are the ones who get slaughtered. I reveal them for what they are. I pull out the plug, and . . . pssss . . .they deflate."

Written and originally performed by Fo himself, "Mistero Buffo" consists of a series of pieces involving mime, improvisation and performance art. The texts are fiercely anti-Church, anti-materialist and anti-authority, but they are written with a comic verve and playful sensibility that mark Dario Fo as a remarkably unique writer, director, and performer. Drawing on religious traditions, the pieces include Fo's modern take on Biblical stories entitled "Slaughter of the Innocents", "Marriage at Cana" and "Resurrection of Lazarus", as well as a series of short dialogues (entitled "Passion Plays") where Fo adumbrates the death of Christ as experienced by Mary. All of these pieces border on the blasphemous, subverting conventional pieties and unthinking reverence for established religion and replacing them with a kind of popular re-writing of Christianity, a revision which glorifies the common man at the expense of those in power. Not surprisingly, "Mistero Buffo", like most of Fo's texts and performances, is controversial and provocative. It is also, however, a short text worth reading for an insightful sampling of one of Italy's most remarkable literary and theatrical geniuses.

This book reads like one long rain delay, with Royals radio legends Denny and Fred telling anecdotes to kill time. Their remarks are committed to paper, but there's little structure or much evidence of any unifying vision for this book.

I could listen to Denny all day, and this transcription captures his vocal style of lengthy explanations and punchy summaries. For example, about his easygoing relationship with Muriel Kauffman, Denny says, "I could say things to her and people would ask me, 'How do you say that to her?' People misjudged her. She was a very outgoing, gregarious, fun-loving person." I could pick any of a dozen examples like that. It's nice to hear Denny's voice, even in print.

Anyone hoping for gossip or criticism will be deeply disappointed. These are rain delay anecdotes. Fred says that Denny is a "confirmed bachelor", and Denny talks about how Lou Piniella would get angry after making a mistake on the field. Both announcers talk about their rural childhoods and how they worked their way into the Royals job. Denny likes to play hockey; Fred prefers family life. Even the dismissals of Fred and previous announcer Buddy Blattner are mentioned but vaguely glossed over. That's the kind of genial discussion that's in this book.

Except that I shouldn't call it discussion. The two authors alternate long stretches of text; it's as though they were never in the same room for the creation of this book. It reads as if Fulks just copied down separate sessions of audio tape and tried to arrange pieces of them into themes. Add 16 pages of photos, and it's done.

So there you have it. This is not so much a book as a loosely organized collection of transcribed interviews. Nothing controversial, nothing very critical. It's as if you could preserve a drizzly day like a jar of grape jam. Reading this book will bring back a lot of memories for Royals fans, and maybe that's all you want.

do you remember sitting on the stoop after you got finished mowing the lawn and listening to the last few innings of a baseball game with 2 great announcers calling the game? this is a great book about two of the best. it will bring back great memories of Royals baseball and is interesting to anyone who is a fan.

One simply must be dialectical about it, which is hard to do. On the one hand, it celebrates in a deeply human and comic way the "new South Africa" of the 1990s--a fragile creation that needed to be celebrated both at home and abroad. And contrary to Fugard's harshest critics, he raises some difficult issues that he refuses to paper over completely (land reform and restitution, rural unemployment, the lingering effects of White privilege, etc). On the other hand, the play releases the tension of these problems in a syrup of sentimentality that, perhaps to your ironist's sense of horror, really does work its magic on audiences (present company included). So what the heck do you do with this play? I still don't know, in the big scheme of things. However, there are many smaller schemes that cause me no such difficulty. If you are interested in South African literature, I think you should feel obligated to read it. Ditto if your work takes you into the fields of political theatre. Perhaps the most exciting context in which to read this play would be to place it alongside our own country's history of sentimental/literary attempts to resist and 'work through' racism. Finally, the play can also be seen as taking place within the rhetorical space of "truth and reconciliation," a topic that embraces an exciting range of literature from Eastern Europe to South America.

With the blight of apartheid lifted from South Africa, Athol Fugard, that nation's dominant voice in the theater, turns toward a quieter, more introspective story. It is daring in its simplicity, and absolutely shattering in its emotional impact. Its lovely, rural musings on hope, despair, and growth resonate far beyond the fields the action inhabits. There is an excellent framing device of an author (meant to represent Fugard, himself) in whose perceptual inadequacies we find a mirror for our own. Highly recommended.

This book is great! It is a wonderful Resource for anyone seeking to self-publish. I highly recommend it!

This book served as a wonderful resource. This is a must have for anyone interested in self-publishing. Great Work!

Although this book doesn't have much to say about the making of 24 or what happens behind the scenes, it is a very good summary of the plot and events of the fantastic first season of 24. Each day is covered in detail, and the book raises good points and questions about the show. It asks reasonable things about possible plot holes without becoming too whiny, and it's clear that the writer actually enjoys the show himself. This book isn't essiential to a 24 fan, but it's definitely a good read.