Drama Books - Page 2

Charlotte's Web (Play Format)

Joseph Robinette

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 424 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Very Good Book 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This is the story about the famous pig Wilbur, who was born tiny, but was saved by a little girl, Fern, and later saved by a spider named Charlotte.

Fern convinces her dad to let her take care of the tiny baby pig until he is big enough to go back into the barn. After he goes back into the barn, he still needs to be saved from being made into ham and bacon and sausage.

I loved the cozy barn life and the animals, and the relationship of Wilbur, Charlotte, Fern, Templeton, the sheep, and the geese.

I also loved the fair. I love fairs, so naturally, I loved this part of the book.

The first time I read this book was when I was thirteen. Back then, I really loved the book so much, and felt it was perfect and flawless. Since then, I saw bits and pieces of the movie when it came on tv (I'm not a tv or movie watcher).

I always knew I would eventually read the book again. I finally did. However, this time, I did not find it perfect and flawless. Although the storyline was still perfect and sweet, there were gross things in this book that did not bother me when I was thirteen. The older I get, the more sensitive I get. It's hard to believe I grew up in a farm/ranch situation and around "gross" things, but they didn't bother me back then; now I know I could never live on a farm again. That's why one star is missing; while I was reading this book, I couldn't eat or even think about eating - I'm that sensitive to "gross" things.

Editorial Review:

Since its publication in 1952, Charlotte's Web has become one of America's best-loved children’s books.This special cloth-bound anniversary edition features Garth Williams’s original drawings lovingly colorized by renowned illustrator Rosemary Wells. Also included is a retrospective essay written in honor of this anniversary by scholar Peter Neumeyer, about the development and publication of this landmark book. The Charlotte's Web 50th Anniversary Edition is a keepsake book that readers of all ages will cherish.

The Bfg (Big Friendly Giant) (Play)

David Wood

List Price: $14.40 By: Samuel French Amazon Marketplace: 10 new & used starting at $4.32

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 321 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

BFG 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Great story for a read aloud. Kids love listening to and reading along with the descriptive language.

The BFG 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Roald Dahl is the author of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "Matilda," and "The Witches" and other children's classics. The BFG is about a girl who lives at an orphanage named Sophie. When Sophie sees a giant, when she shouldn't have, the giant has no other choice but to snatch her. But the giant isn't like the other giants. Good thing or otherwise he might have eaten Sophie after taking her from the orphanage. In the giant's world, things are very different for Sophie. After she learns about the other giants who do eat people, she creates a plan to save the world from them with the BFG's help of course.

Editorial Review:

"Well, first of all, " said the BFG, "human beans is not really believing in giants, is they? Human beans is not thinking we exist."

Sophie discovers that giants not only exist, but that there are a great many of them who like to guzzle and swallomp nice little chiddlers. But not the Big Friendly Giant. He and Sophie cook up an ingenious plot to free the world of troggle-humping -- forever.

Performed by Natasha Richardson

A Fine Balance (Modern Plays)

Rohinton Mistry

List Price: $14.27 By: Methuen Drama Amazon Marketplace: 7 new & used starting at $18.56

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 565 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Devastating and Brilliant: Worth 600+ pages and more 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I have never encountered a book so moving as Mistry's A Fine Balance. Following the story of Ishvar and Om, I found myself so invested in what was happening to them - the injustice of India's government is infuriating, and the ways in which the overcoming of an obstacle only leads to another is simultaneously depressing and motivational, due to the resilience of each character.

A Fine Balance is not a light read, but once you begin, you will not be able to stop. Mistry maintains a balance between revealing the utter desperation of the homeless and the ways in which each character finds value in life, despite every force working against it.

I was moved by this book as if I were watching a movie, laughing out loud and crying to myself during the ups and downs of the plot.

The beauty of the book is in the conclusion, as Mistry does not employ any shallow devices to wrap things up in order to make the reader feel redeemed after the devastation. It is realistic, sad, and fulfilling all at once. I left questioning whether or not I would be able to live my life with the same optimism were I in the same situation.

This book will force you to view your life through a different lens, and you will be better off for reading it.

Editorial Review:

Based on the Booker-shortlisted novel by Rohinton Mistry and adapted by Sudha Bhuchar and Kristine Landon-Smith, this program text edition of A Fine Balance is published to coincide with Tamasha Theatre Company's 2007 revival and tour of the hit play.

A Separate Peace

John Knowles

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 769 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

The Nihilist Proposition: Negative & Repugnant 1 out of 5 stars.
4 of 13 people found this review helpful.

/

"A Separate Peace" by John Knowles is a confusing book, which is why it is endorsed for popular consumption.

The reason is that when values are confused, people are far more readily manipulated; moreso, than if they were presented with a story whose propositions by way of story line were more explicit and unconfusing. The novel has nothing at all to do with PEACE, but a lot to do with ANGST, which the author offers as a desireable personality trait.

The first element in the story is its SELF-ABSORBED tone. The random presentation of events, and the fact that the actions of the characters are not founded upon human IDEATION, creates a perfect scenario for an elaborate HALF-TRUTH to be imposed upon the reader. The characters wander through a labyrinth of activities which are meaningless, purposeless, and thoughtless. It's a social engineer's paradise.

In this labyrinth of literary devices Knowle's presents a camouflaged ideation, which is incomplete of course, because the author is offering characters that are conveniently unhinged from reality.

This disconnection permits the dialogue to float adrift on a sea of uncertainty. Unfortunately, the uncertainty is presented as an invariable, and certitude simply isn't there.

What remains is a nihilistic proposition in which people navigate a foggy landscape, with no place to go, and nothing particular to do but wallow around in a teleological No Man's land.

The novel has appeal to people who endorse such propositions, finding fuzzy meanings and messages in the vaccuous verbiage; but that is precisely the author's intention.

There is virtually no value in reading such literature, unless one is merely curious about how nihilistic messages are implanted in the collective psyche, and how human Egotism and self-centeredness become a general proposal as a basis upon which to found a life.

In all, it is literary nonsense, whose potential damage to the human psyche is evident to anyone with an ability to sort through the author's manipulations of logic in storyline and dialogue. It's rather like a "code" in scripted form, with no benefit, unless the reader views as a benefit, fictionalized melodrama and fictionalized crises.

As the proverbialism goes, John Knowles doesn't have anything I want.

--Bruce R. Bain

/

Editorial Review:

One of a series of top-quality fiction for schools, this is the story of a friendship between two 16-year-old boys in an American boarding school - one a natural athlete and the other a scholar. Their different temperaments cause tensions that lead to tragedy.

Lolita (Perennial Bestseller Collection)

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 449 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A road movie of the mind 5 out of 5 stars.
30 of 31 people found this review helpful.

Praise be to Graham Greene, who was not only an interesting novelist (e.g. The Quiet American), but he also has the merit of saving Nabokov's Lolita from obscurity. When the book found no publisher in the US, it was first brought out by a shady Parisian company that specialized in erotic books in the English language. That was a tourist attraction in Paris. For reasons unknown to me (why would Greene even know the series? he had other oddities about his character), Greene took notice of the book and named it as one of the best books of the year in a magazine article in the UK. That was the beginning of the road to fame and riches for Nabokov, including an Oscar winning, but lousy movie.
I admit I have not read Lolita recently, but I did at least twice some time ago, and I read his movie script in the LoA volume. Why do I review it now? Simply because J. talked me into it. Women can be persistent.
J did not like Lolita because she saw it as pedophile porno. I am aware that one can read the book that way. Actually most of the first buyers must have been looking for that, but most of them were badly disappointed.
Sure, the book is about a pedophile, but Nabokov never told us a straightforward story. One must be prepared to encounter mystifications and traps and double meanings.
Lolita's main text body is the alleged memoir of a man who has died in jail, where he was held for murder. We learn only late into the story who the victim was. Oddly, he was not in jail for rape and kidnapping, which he freely admits to in his text.
The hero is a decadent middle aged European of a cultured background. He has come to New England as a professor for literature. He is a pedophile, who can only 'love' pre-puberty girls. Nabokov's original title for the book was Kingdom by the Sea after E.A.Poe's poem. Humbert Humbert (the name should tell us that we can't expect clear sailing on meanings) settles down and meets a woman with the kind of daughter that he fancies. He marries her to get at the child. The woman dies (don't necessarily believe the version of her death that HH tells us), he kidnaps the girl Dolores, rapes her, and goes on the road with her, moving from place to place all over the US, settling here and there briefly, always running away before attachments can be formed. And still there comes a time when Lolita runs away from captivity.
What is the book about? It is also a little bit about pedophilia, sure, but it is mainly about an immigrant's experience of the US. Nabokov wrote about his own observations with his New England university environment, and to a large extent he wrote about his long car trips across the US on his butterfly hunts. The places where HH stays with Lolita are Nab's own stations, where he stayed with his wife, who drove the car.
HH is not a man who can be believed. He twists his tale to his liking, and even his admissions of wrongdoings with the girl have a strong smell of self-saving euphemism. The man is a self-centered egomaniac.
Lolita is not my favorite Nab-book, actually, but it is well worth reading more than once.

Editorial Review:

General FictionLarge Print EditionThe only convincing love story of our century. Vanity FairIntensely lyrical and wildly funny. TimeLolita tells the story of aging Hubert Humbert who has an obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet, Dolores Haze. It is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. All in all, Lolita is filled with awe and exhilaration, along with heartbreak and mordant wit.

The Master and Margarita (Oberon Modern Plays)

Mikhail Bulgakov

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 341 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A GIFT FROM THE GRAVE 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I found Mikhail Bulgakov's life terribly sad, as I progressed through this novel, realizing how much of it is autobiographical. Here was a brilliant man---the grandson of Priests, who was obviously quite theologically challenged in atheist Russia. His motif surrounding the existence of Jesus and the Devil, told through stories of Faust and Pontius Pilate, was obviously his personal desire to master the concept of good versus evil, in a culture of oppression, brutality, and subjugation, not to mention censorship---the slow death of a creative, freedom-seeking, artist.

A good deal of the read may appear to just be magical folly but on careful inspection, it is filled with deep, political satire and symbolism attacking Stalin's Communist Russia and the justifiable paranoia it bred. The ridicule, denouncement and exposure was nothing short of genius, as were the characters that carried out his themes, my favorite being the personification of the big as a pig, Vodka craving, Black Cat.

Bulgakov, was clearly before his time and it is sad he died at 48. His history shows a man who was broken by his inability of free expression. His determination to complete his works, in spite of censorship, is a testament to his spirit and perseverance---one of the strongest reasons that this book deserves to be read by all. I consider it a literary gift from the grave, carrying messages we must never forget.

Be warned that this is not a quick and easy read---at least it was not for me. I suspect that I've missed, or misinterpreted many scenarios that will read differently with a repeat read. Simply put, it's like trying to watch a ten ring circus---in more ways than one. But, you won't want to miss a single ring of action.

Editorial Review:

A mysterious stranger and his retinue have astonished the locals of Stalin's Moscow with the magic show to end all magic shows and have quite literally set the town alight. But what's the real purpose behind their visit?

Hamlet (The New Folger Library Shakespeare)

William Shakespeare

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Utter Tripe 1 out of 5 stars.
6 of 14 people found this review helpful.

What kind of idiot writes this tripe? This is allegedly a "Play" by some long-dead "Master".

Well, let me tell, you: it's boring and derivative. It's about this Prince who doesn't get his father's throne, and feels all depressed about it for a while, and fights back against his uncle (who took the throne and married the prince's mother), to show everyone that it was actually the uncle who killed his father the king.

Excuse me? Haven't we heard this before?

Yep: Disney's "The Lion King".

This is "The Lion King" dressed up in period clothes. Instead of "Simba", we've got "Hamlet". Instead of "Scar", we've got "Claudius". Instead of "Nala", we've got "Ophelia".

And it's in "Denmark", instead of the African Plains. Denmark? Is that even a real country anymore? Anyways, it's called Europe, now; That's a part of London.

And don't get me started on the language this writer used! It's all like it's from the Bible and stuff. Get rid of that, and use real words: Take a lesson from someone like Stephen King.

Don't waste your time with this; watch "The Lion King", and you'll get it. And while you're at it, there's a bridge in Brooklyn I'm selling.

Editorial Review:

Each edition includes:

• Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play

• Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play

• Scene-by-scene plot summaries

• A key to famous lines and phrases

• An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language

• An essay by an outstanding scholar providing a modern perspective on the play

• Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books

Essay by Michael Neill

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare's printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit www.folger.edu.

American Pastoral

Philip Roth

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 221 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Scrupulous Account of a Pivotal Point in America 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

I recently finished an outstandingly beautiful novel (The Master Planets), and immediately went into one of those "I'll-Never-Find-Anything-As-Good-Again" funks. Then I found this book, which is not only a brilliant piece of literature (it's by Roth, after all), but also deals with some fascinating issues similar to those in Planets--issues I wanted to read more about.

As just one example: I am not Jewish, but have noticed in certain writings something uniquely poignant in the Jewish love for America immediately after World War II. This was the country that had taken in many Jews' parents and grandparents in a way never before experienced, I believe. For the first time they were not outsiders, but simply immigrants in a land full of immigrants. And for the first time, every opportunity--in this nation of bounteous opportunities--was open to them. It is not surprising that the name "America" would become almost a hymn on the lips of many American Jews in this period, that they would develop an unparalleled love for their country. As all of America basked in a cornucopian economy and the righteous sense that our own good works had entitled us to it, American Jews were, perhaps, "Ultimate Americans." So it is also not surprising that, like everyone else, they also gave little thought to the idea that the richness of life here might be too well fed by our military industrial complex and exploitation of Third World nations.

The protagonist, Seymour "Swede" Levov, certainly does not think about these things, and therein lies his downfall. As Amazon reviewer Ian Muldoon (above) so aptly notes, the central question of the book is whether it is acceptable for Levov to to accept that he is one of the lucky ones and simply enjoy his place in time and history, or whether his good luck also carries an obligation. An inherently decent man, Levov does not look beyond his own life to wonder if it impinges on the lives of others. But his daughter cannot feel so sanguine. Merry has not had the good fortune of Seymour and his wife to be thought "perfect": She grew up with a terrible stutter, over which her beautiful parents agonized. Is this what gave her the ability (willingness? determination?) to see the fissures in the edifice they revere? In any event, she sees the fissures yawning, and her answer is to place sticks of dynamite in them -- and later to withdraw so far from the world that she scarcely eats so as not to "destroy plant life," and will not even wash for fear of "harming the water." She has started by demolishing the world around her, and is now obliterating herself. Miraculously, the stutter that at one time "terrified" Levov is gone... as she herself soon will be.

American Pastoral is the story of a beautiful nation that, about 40 years ago, let some part of its best self slip away. As the "Ultimate American," Levov is the perfect symbol. As he thinks, so thought we.

Editorial Review:

As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.

For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longer-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.

August: Osage County

Tracy Letts

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Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

"A tremendous achievement in American playwriting: a tragicomic populist portrait of a tough land and a tougher people."-Time Out New York

"Tracy Letts' August: Osage County is what O'Neill would be writing in 2007. Letts has recaptured the nobility of American drama's mid-century heyday while still creating something entirely original."-New York magazine

One of the most bracing and critically acclaimed plays in recent Broadway history, August: Osage County is a portrait of the dysfunctional American family at its finest-and absolute worst. When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed. After its sold-out Chicago premiere, the play has electrified audiences in New York since its opening in November 2007.

Tracy Letts is the author of Killer Joe, Bug, and Man from Nebraska, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His plays have been performed throughout the country and internationally. A performer as well as a playwright, Letts is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where August: Osage County premiered.

Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca

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Total reviews: 491 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

With these words, the reader is ushered into an isolated gray stone mansion on the windswept Cornish coast, as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter recalls the chilling events that transpired as she began her new life as the young bride of a husband she barely knew. For in every corner of every room were phantoms of a time dead but not forgotten—a past devotedly preserved by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers: a suite immaculate and untouched, clothing laid out and ready to be worn, but not by any of the great house's current occupants. With an eerie presentiment of evil tightening her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter walked in the shadow of her mysterious predecessor, determined to uncover the darkest secrets and shattering truths about Maxim's first wife—the late and hauntingly beautiful Rebecca.

This special edition of Rebecca includes excerpts from Daphne du Maurier's The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories, an essay on the real Manderley, du Maurier's original epilogue to the book, and more.