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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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