A suite of innovative and emotional dramas depicting an embattled family.
Epstein examines the effect of mental illness on the family unit in this trio of dramatic plays.
The plays follow middle-aged parents Micah and Tess and their adult children: the oldest, exasperated Ava; the middle one, comedian Beezie; and the youngest, the difficult Arky; Arky is a former golden child who has transformed into a combative drinker and drug-user in his 20s. The first play, Mahalo, follows the family’s attempts to deal with Arky after he’s diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder. In Desperados, Tess pressures Micah to put the battered family home on the market, which unleashes a flood of memories of their many years there. In the first scene of the concluding Arky, the family deals with the fallout of Arky leaping out of a moving car on the highway for no apparent reason, leading his parents to wonder if they wouldn’t all be better off if Arky were dead. But Arky doesn’t die: the play leaps forward in time 10 years, and then another 10, sketching out the peculiar life of this troubled man to see where he finally ends up. The plays have postmodern flourishes, with stark staging involving ramps and platforms and precise lighting directions. Characters frequently break the fourth wall, launching into songs or stand-up routines to comment on the action. The format helps to capture the absurdity of mental illness, both for the sufferer and those around him. When Micah tells Tess, nonjudgmentally, that he’d bet she was an alcoholic, Tess responds, “You would? Who cares? We left the planet years ago. We’re out there—just out there in orbit, visiting our boy in Crazyland.” According to the author’s preface, these pieces have never been produced—the reader will be anxious to one day see one or all of these plays staged in a theater. Until then, these pages provide a suitable window into Arky’s Crazyland.
A suite of innovative and emotional dramas depicting an embattled family.Pub Date: July 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781953943354
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Retriever Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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