Last three books of August/06

Sadly, the last three books I have to post about were not stellar achievements for me, so I am just going to post about them together and then I can move on to September and brighter pastures. There were great books this month, but as always, there were others that were just okay or even others that I really didn't like.

First up, The Green Knight by Vera Chapman. I started this book at the beginning of the month, and I just could not get into it. I love Arthurian retellings, but this one played more on the myth of the tale. It was not horrible by the end, but at the same time, not one of my favourite retellings. It brings together a blend of magic and mystery, but the characters are not as compelling as others I have read. It didn't really help that I read The Hawk's Gray Feather this month, another Arthurian novel, and loved it. Vera Chapman might have been better if I didn't have such a good book to compare it to. (If anyone knows where I can get a picture of this book I would appreciate it!)

3/5

The other two books I read were Gods in Alabama and West Side Story. I don't think these two books were horrible, just not what I wanted to be reading at the time I chose to read them. West Side Story, sad to say, has been destroyed literature-wise by movies and plays. Sometimes I just can't get into the book if I have seen other mediums of it. I know that lots of people liked Gods in Alabama. I just couldn't get into it, maybe another time I will read it and think it is great, but not on this read through.

West Side Story 3.5/5
Gods in Alabama 3/5

Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapukasing - [March/06]

This is another play that I attempted to read over the last couple months. It was written by a Canadian, actually, and deals with Native rights as the main issue of the story. The play takes place at a fictional Native reserve in Canada. There are many characters to the play, but only one female role, the rest of the characters are men. One of the main things that happens in the play is that the women of the reserve decide that they want to play ice hockey, Canada's favourite pasttime. All the men of the play are big hockey fanatics, and they attempt to be understanding to the women and their attempt to be different. The play also covers Native stereotypes, for example one of the children in the play has fetal alcohol syndrome because his mother drank. A past time that is stereotypically placed with all Natives. The author does not necessarily say that the stereotypes are true, he just shows what could happen if they were. The big theme to this play, though, is lose of identity. By watching the scenes play out, you see that these Natives quite similarly to white man. They have lost the things that made them individuals, and the author tries to bring them back. He shows that religion has either been adapted to meet the white mans views or has to be risque and dangerous to get noticed. One of the men in the play is obsessed with this lose of identity and during the course of the play brings back his native traditions in small quantities.

Overall, not a bad play, but I found it not as readable as others. It is probably much better if you get to see it first hand.

3.5/5

Angels in America - Tony Kushner [March/06]

Angels in America is one of the greatest plays ever performed on stage. It was something I was always aware of but never really paid the appropriate amount of attention to. When I read the play, though, I was quite entralled with it and hope to eventually get around to renting the mini-series that was later put out. The play covers so many issues that someone could go on for months about all the little details. It is a play about acceptance, gays, AIDs, politics, religion, forgiveness, family, love, friendship, relationships, mental illness, understanding, and the list goes on and on. It is a very profound play.

In the play, we follow main characters. One of the characters has AIDs, another is a famous lawyer dying of AIDs but claiming he had cancer, another is a gay man in a relationship with a woman, there is a gay man that has lost himself and cannot handle difficult situations, a woman that is not totally aware of the world around her, a mother coming to terms with the changing times, and many more characters. The first character I mentioned with AID's is one of the more central characters to the play. Many of the other characters in the play interact with him and then they interact with other people and draw them into the same sphere. He is living a bleak existence, his lover could not handle the AIDs and leaves him and he finds himself very much alone in the world. He has interactions with angels, though, that are some of the more phenomenal scenes in the play.

The man that has AIDs and is pretending he is dying of cancer is quite the character. He is based off a real person who was a famous lawyer but was not always shrewd about catching the guilty party. One such case comes back to haunt him through the play. He dies very painfully and at a time when his lawyers license was being reviewed and eventually taken away from him. He does at the bottom instead of at the top where he thought he spent so much of his life.

The man that is gay in a straight relationship does not really care to admit that he is gay. His wife has mental illnesses and is often high of valium, a common drug at the time in this play. She is trying to get her life together but it always seems like for every step she takes forward she takes two more back. She is having a hard time accepting her husbands new lifestyle.

All of these characters, and more, interact in an environment of not being accepted. They all have problems that were scorned during the 80's, when this play takes place, and are all trying to get by in a world that is so set against them. You don't have to read this play, but I suggest you watch the mini-series. It really does touch you in a way that you gain a new understanding.

4/5

Last Summer at Bluefish Cove - Jane Chambers [February/06]

I skipped over this when I was doing up this month, so I read it earlier in the month, but close enough. This was a play written by a female playwright. It is really a simple play, but it does have a few messages for its readers. At the beginning of the play we are introduced to a woman fishing at Bluefish Cove, a beach resort. She is just there, it is nothing special, but that is the opening scene. Another woman enters the scene, she has just terminated her marriage and was looking for somewhere, anywhere, to go. She just drove and Bluefish Cove is where she ended up. It is this brief interaction between these two women that shows just how different they are. For starters, the woman fishing is a lesbian, while the other woman is so naive she does not pick up on it. She is from an upper class and likely has lived a very sheltered life. She has never even had to work before. What she finds out by attending a Bluefish Cove party is that she is the only "straight" woman in the area, only lesbians rent out Bluefish Cove. She had been worried she would be out of place with all the women and men, but instead she was out of place in the fact that she did not know.

This play seems to be about informing. There is a stigma surrounding woman that have relations with the same sex and many people think of them as different. In the play, though, Chambers shows the woman as like anyone else. They have bad relationships, they cook, they drink, they fish, just a regular lifestyle. It would appear that Chambers is trying to say: "look at us, we are basically just like everyone else, we just have a different sexual preference". In the play you still see women hiding from who they really are. One of the women in the play is an author of feminist books and was previously a doctor. She is terrifed that someone might find out that she is a lesbian, and it takes her friend (the fisher) having cancer to slowly come to terms with who she really is. There are no actual male characters in the play, but they have a presence nonetheless. The men are the ones that took everything because their wife left them for another woman, one of the women in the play is even paying her lovers children's way through university because of the ex-husbands hurt pride. It is really a very interesting play with interesting characters and a message to others to not judge lesbians so harshly.

3.5/5

Cloud Nine - Caryl Churchill [February/06]

This is one of the more confusing plays I have undertaken over the last few months. I think it would be a much better play to see in action rather than read as if a book. The author, Caryl Churchill, wishes to cover a lot of major themes in her play. Just a few of them are sexual preference, race, class setting, gender, and much more. In the first half of the play, we witness a Victorian era family residing in a British colony in Africa. The husband is in charge of the "natives", while the rest of the family is expected to reside at home and "be good". The young daughter is even played by a doll in this scene to show her believed mental capabilities. Churchill also causes confusion further by the fact that some of the women characters are played by men, while some of the men characters are played by women. When you are reading it you sometimes forget and just see them as a man or a woman and nothing more, but when you watch it on a stage she hopes that people will overlook the colour, creed, sex, etc and see that when you really think about it, these things are meaningless. The slave, who is said to come from a native tribe, is even played by a white man.

As if some of these qualities in the beginning are not confusing, the second half of the play takes place a hundred years or so after the first part. This might not sound all that bad, but the characters from the first half, some of them are in the second act. The children are adults now and the adults are seniors. They are back in England and the characters are sometimes played by different people than they were in the first half. It is closer to the modern period, and one of the main issues to come out of it is sexual preference. Throughout both halves of the play, characters choose their sexual partners from the same or different sexes quite sporadically. There are only a few "straight" characters in the play, and even some of them by the end are questioning their choices.

It is just a basic story of colonialism and then later life in Britian, but at the same time Churchill has written a play that causes the readers or viewers to question how the world is. Do the things that we make matter so much really matter? Is colour of importance in how you treat someone? Does it matter what sex you choose to spend the rest of your life with? Does it even matter if you are male or female? These are the questions that Churchill leaves you with at the end of the play.

3.5/5

Uncommon Women and Others - Wendy Wasserstein (January/06)

It is with great saddness that I start this post with a note that Wendy Wasserstein passed away from cancer a couple weeks ago. :(

This is a play, for those that are unfamiliar with the title, I have been reading a few plays here and there to broaden my horizons. This play came out in 1977 originally. The author, Wasserstein, wrote this play while a student at the Yale School of Drama. It is a portrait of the aspirations of 8 undergraduate woman at Mount Holyoke College in the early 1970s. The girls have come together in 1978 to look back on their college years together. Not all the girls are present, some of them are off having advenutures, but the majority of the central characters are there. Six to be exact. Most of the action in the play takes place in the past. It takes place during a period in time where women were battling for their rights in the US. The point of this play seems to be women thinking that they are "uncommon" and planing how their future is going to be. It was a time when women were forced to repress their creativity, their identity all to fit in. In 1978, the women have grown into successful but troubled adults, still living out the desire for freedom and self-determination that was instilled in them and thwarted by their "uncommon" education.

The play may not seem shocking to people today, but when it was performed it was quite unheard of. One of the teachers of the girls school is a lesbian, and she goes on about being a proper girl while she is breaking the rules of properness, in a manner of speaking. This play was actually the first of a trilogy on the feminist movement, I plan to read the later plays in the future.

In the play, there is Kate who is studying to be a lawyer. In the future meeting she is the only girl that has a job that was not "common" to women. Rita refuses to live in the present, she sees things only in means of the future. The other girls are generally just women who are educated but intimiated by what that means, even after they are in their future. The point of this play, to me, was that it is hard to be an "uncommon" woman because men are intimitated by a woman that is more successful than them. Kate, out of the girls at the restaurant, seems to be the only one that remained "uncommon".

Even though a play is meant to be acted, it was a good read.

3.5/5

Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller (January/06)

This is the famous American play written by Arthur Miller, who, as a pointless fact, was at one time married to Marilyn Munroe. It is not a long play, but in its short pages it covers many important issues about the world at large.

In the play we have Willy Loman who is the wornout, dreaming salesman that is the central character to the play. Then, as a sort of comparison, we have his two sons: Biff who is the all-American star but yet can't fit into American society and Happy who ironically is the unhappy younger brother.

All the action in the play is centred on one specific moment: Willy is approaching the end of his career, his glad-handing sale contacts are all dead or retired and he no longer is pulling in business for the company. He is quite honestly, about to be fired. The play has a lot going on because not only does it take place in the present, but it also blends scenes from the past when Willy is a young father, when he has a woman in Boston, and when Biff finds out that his father is not the man he thought he was.

This play was written to contradict the American dream. Willy was well-liked and worked hard, but even at the end he had hardly anything to show for it; which is not what the American dream was expected to do. In this play we find out what started Willy in his career and the bumps in the road all through his life. His wife is often the voice of reason, but as was typical of the time, no one ever seemed to listen to her. It is a play about the downward spiral of an ordinary man and you can not help but feel sorry for him.

Plays are hard to rate because they are not meant to be read, they are meant to be performed. So, let's say 4/5.