Are you ready for our final book club of the year? Well, ready or not here we go to cap off another year of reading and discussing together! The Real Inspector Hound is a quick, funny play where Tom Stoppard takes aim at theatre, critics, reality, and fate. While its one act zips by in 50 pages or less, it still manages to have opinions about our place in the world around us. Ground rules remain the same as before, discuss in the comments below, […]
Well, I think I’ll go and oil my gun.
Opening salvo, hot take: everything Tom Stoppard has ever written is incredible; this isn’t his best work. The Real Inspector Hound is the first live production of a Stoppard play I ever saw, followed about a year and a half later by Arcadia. So, I will always be grateful to Hound for preparing me, because otherwise Arcadia might have melted my brain, and working directly with Tom (humblebrag) on The Coast of Utopia would have been the actual death of me. Hound is a delight. […]
Fave play is fave
“None but libertines delight in him.” Claudio and Hero love each other and want to get married. Beatrice and Benedick….well that’s what the play is about. Look this play makes no fucking sense what-so-ever. I mean, why is Hero wooed by someone else, in a mask? Why the fuck does Dogberry stumble around? And Claudio is dickweasel numero uno for believing Don John whatshisface…who meddles to actually give the play a plot. But then again, this is much ado about nothing so it does make […]
An acclaimed Arthur Miller play with mixed results
I never read The Crucible in high school, but The Chancellor’s taught it to his American Literature class before, and he’s talked to me about Arthur Miller and the ideas he wrote about in his plays. Plus, I’d seen the AWFUL adaptation that was quite thick on nakedness and a bit thin on thematic development, so I was curious to see how the play would stack up. And, let’s not forget that we’re living in a weird hybrid McCarthyistic/Nixonian era that I thought only existed […]
It doesn’t get better than this
Much Ado About Nothing is by far my favorite Shakespeare play. I love most of his others too (especially Twelfth Night, Macbeth, & Romeo and Juliet), but this play is special. It’s fun to watch/read but surprisingly complex. If you haven’t ever seen/read it, I highly recommend starting with the Branaugh movie version and then reading an annotated copy. I actually own the dramatized audio version with David Tennant and Samantha Spiro, so I really like listening while I read along in hard copy. They’re […]
Read this before the movie comes out, Part II
The Chancellor, as a high school English teacher and aficionado of mid-to-late twentieth century American drama, is more well-versed in plays than I am in most time periods. When he heard that August Wilson’s Fences was being turned into a film with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis (also known as The Queen, can we just give her a damn Oscar already???), he freaked out. And then he was startled when I confessed that I had never read or seen it. So he put it into […]
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