Smart, gossipy and oh-so-dramatic—squarely in the grand tradition of theater memoirs.
The Tony Award–winning director looks back on his apprenticeship years.
Born in 1939, O’Brien wrote two successful musicals at the University of Michigan and planned to become a successful Broadway lyricist/playwright. Then the APA Repertory Company arrived to inaugurate the university’s Professional Theatre Program, and he was swept into the glamorous orbit of leading lady Rosemary Harris and actor/director Ellis Rabb, who hired him after he graduated. O’Brien served as the volatile Rabb’s devoted amanuensis—dealing with practical matters, playing small parts, standing in for him onstage when he needed to direct rehearsals—while APA built a reputation in regional theater and stormed Broadway with a dazzling revival of You Can’t Take It With You. Himself unabashedly gay, O’Brien empathetically portrays the complicated marriage of Harris and the bisexual Rabb, which survived his homosexual affairs but foundered on his jealousy of her greater star power. Theater-history buffs will relish O’Brien’s vivid descriptions and cogent assessments of such famed APA productions as the Erwin Piscator–adapted War and Peace, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, directed by Eva Le Gallienne, and the black farce Pantagleize, a personal triumph for Rabb in the title role. O’Brien finally emerged from his mentor’s shadow when producer John Houseman, who joined APA in 1965, pushed him to direct Sean O’Casey’s Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, a less-than-auspicious debut, with the company heading toward dissolution as Rabb’s drinking and mental instability both increased. O’Brien closes the main narrative with his triumphant direction of the Houston Grand Opera’s 1976 Porgy and Bess; a sad afterword chronicles his final break with Rabb. A quarter-century as artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre and such Broadway hits as Hairspray were yet to come, but O’Brien’s evocative, loving reminiscences make clear how indelibly his artistic vision was forged in the crucible of regional and repertory theater, among some of the giants of the American stage.
Smart, gossipy and oh-so-dramatic—squarely in the grand tradition of theater memoirs.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-86547-898-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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