Archives for May 7, 2004

No, I’m not here, nor am I blogging from my secret hideaway. I wrote this posting on Wednesday and stowed it with Our Girl for your Friday-morning delectation.

As usual, I’m in The Wall Street Journal today, this time with reviews of Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, Mark Medoff’s Prymate, and Neil LaBute’s The Distance from Here.

Frozen is brilliant:

Here’s a phrase that makes my blood run cold: “That play deals with a lot of really good issues.” I myself prefer plays that deal with life, not issues, but the two have been known to overlap on occasion, and it’s not unheard of for a really good playwright to use a “really good issue” as the pretext for a voyage into the unchartable labyrinth of human motivation. More often, what you get is a pulpit-pounding sermon with a politically correct moral, but Bryony Lavery’s “Frozen,” which transferred to Circle in the Square this week after a successful Off-Broadway run, is the polar opposite, an issue-driven play that grinds no axes. It is superior in every way-script, performances, staging, set. If I had tonight off, I’d go see it again….

Prymate is awful:

Esther (Phyllis Frelich), a deaf-mute anthropologist, steals Graham (Andr

The always captivating Eve Tushnet has been listing great titles, of books mainly. She comes up with so many, though, that the list quickly becomes a little bit numbing, the titles a little indistinct from each other. I’m curious what she’d say are her top five. Challenge!

Here are a few that I didn’t see on her list or those of her readers: Two Girls, Fat and Thin. I Lost It at the Movies (or should I say Kiss Kiss Bang Bang?). The Man without Qualities. The Gastronomical Me. And, what the hell, Consider the Oyster. And of course my all-purpose favorite, The Dud Avocado.

Speaking of Mary Gaitskill, while scanning my bookshelves last night I noticed that her Bad Behavior sits beside Donald Westlake’s Good Behavior. I have no memory of having consciously placed them so; perhaps they just sort of gravitated toward each other smittenly when I wasn’t looking. Hard to think of two more different books, but the spines do complement each other nicely.

Another title I love, but that is simply puzzling if you don’t know anything about the book, is Anthony Burgess’s novel about Keats, ABBA ABBA. Also in the context-counts category is the memoir of (Sir) Frank Kermode, Not Entitled, although on second thought, perhaps it’s a bit too cutely elliptical.

What else?