Engaging, educational interactivity for teenage performers and audiences.
In this debut collection, a current secondary schoolteacher offers original theater pieces, suitable for adolescents to perform and discuss.
Nielsen (Serendipity & the Dream Catcher, 2003, etc.) shares 10 original, short plays that may be produced “sans royalty fees.” Some have already been tested with audiences “in two middle schools and in one high school and were met with outstanding reviews.” She devotes a chapter to each play, complete with discussions of general themes (morality, grief, etc.) and specific staging suggestions. The plays are: Allegorical Chairs, which features Good and Evil among its characters; Chain Link, focused on eating disorders and including flashlights as props; To Be—or Not to Be—One of Us, about peer pressure, with a dream sequence featuring twirling umbrellas; Cup of Random Joes, in which a girl finds a perfect date just under her nose; Two Guys and a Guillotine, based on an “injustice” that Nielsen witnessed; Trilogy of Rude Behavior, showcasing impolite actions in a store, subway, and movie theater; Hold the Phone, a dramatization of miscommunication; Baseball: America’s Pastime, inspired by sexism that Nielsen’s daughter experienced playing the sport; Within and Without Magic, in which magic tricks help a boy deal with his grandfather’s death; and Rainbow Blue, a lesson in tolerance. Performer, writer, and teacher Nielsen, who’s also written children’s books, provides teens (and teachers of teens) with a charming, diverse collection to play out the learning benefits of drama. Her effective use of props, audience-participation prompts, and expressionistic staging (such as the couples physically linked together during parts of Chain Link) create plenty of opportunities for hands-on fun that will involve teens in the performances. Although teens will find some of the author’s plays more naturally entertaining than others, the collection as a whole offers them a good array of subjects and styles to choose from.
Engaging, educational interactivity for teenage performers and audiences.Pub Date: June 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4575-3962-6
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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