A quartet of socially minded plays that wear their themes on their sleeves.
In this collection of plays, Bejan probes the spaces between the world as it is and the way it could be.
The idealistic characters in this collection of plays start out expecting the world to be orderly, only to discover that disorder is the norm. The four-act “To Those Who Haven’t Stopped Thinking” takes place in a post-apocalyptic society known as the Universe, where the rules seem arbitrary and everyone is locked into an unfulfilling social niche. When an idealistic do-gooder arrives from the Beyond, she’s shocked by how much society has deteriorated, but her attempts to reform things don’t go as planned. The 20-scene “DISTRICTLAND” takes place in and around a shared house in Washington, D.C., where a group of young professionals grapple with the highs and lows of government-adjacent work during the height of the Obama years. “Google me, Fool me, Rule me,” goes the slam-poetry opening monologue. “Institution after institution, / Bureaucrats and Bureaucracy / From suburban strip-mall / To the MALL / Concrete urban jungle / The land of opportunity / The land of intensity…” Morgan, a young Black woman, and Gerard, a young Senegalese man, find themselves admitted to a D.C. hospital’s psych ward for their mental health issues in “Finally Quiet in My Mind.” Morgan is haunted by intrusive visions and auditory hallucinations related to her family and her childhood best friend. Can Gerard help her figure out their meaning, even when her doctors have failed? The 10-minute “Life According to Swami Shiva” is a one-scene play with just two characters, a guru named Shiva and his student, Ella. Ella has been harboring deep sexual feelings for her guru; when she finally confesses them, she doesn’t get the response she expects.
Bejan’s plays grapple with the intersection of the political and the personal, examining the friction between the idealized fantasies that inform a person’s actions and the grim reality that often frustrates them. The playwright excels at finding ways to dramatize this conflict, as in “DISTRICTLAND,” when Maria, a young State Department employee growing tired of D.C., criticizes her naïve roommate Dave for the international focus of his “progressive leadership network happy hour”: “MARIA: My problem is that…you are totally ignoring the immediate issues here and now: poverty, education, health care, immigration—I could go on. DAVE: We are not ignoring them! MARIA: Well I didn’t hear a word about any of it at the drinks. DAVE: Read our website.” “DISTRICTLAND” is the strongest of the plays, mostly due to its large cast and free-wheeling, slice-of-life mini-scenes, one of which consists solely of a character singing an Ani DiFranco song to herself in its entirety. On the whole, however, the plays suffer from a tendency to be thematically on the nose, more developed in their political content than they are in their characters or plots. While talented actors could undoubtedly lend some gravitas to these roles, few moments leap off the page.
A quartet of socially minded plays that wear their themes on their sleeves.Pub Date: March 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781387369881
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Lulu.com
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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