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 evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
