Genre: Humorous
Description:
This is an amusing mashup of self-help
literature and a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet through
the eyes of the seriously impoverished artistic director of an ensemble theatre
company in Chicago. Some of the disasters which befall the production have the
ring of truth. Some of the material is laugh-out-loud funny. Often these are
the same bits.
Dwayne Finnegan is in love with his work but
is very aware that doing what he loves is not making him a living. And then his
beloved wife tells him she really wants a baby. Is he going to have to
join the corporate rat race and put a permanent lid on his creativity? Then he
picks up this self-help book and somehow … it helps!
Author:
Richard Engling is or has been an
actor, director, playwright, novelist and musician. He has “spent a lifetime
writing and performing, paying his bills as a teacher, truck driver, and
copywriter, while performing as an actor, drummer in a jazz quartet”, and was the
founding artistic director of Polarity ensemble theatre company in Chicago. He
has written a number of plays (some of which have been collected in print) and three
other novels. He has degrees in Creative Writing and Theatre.
Appraisal:
I picked this for review because I’ve done a
lot of Am Dram in my time (in the UK) and remember very well indeed the
love-hate relationship with it (and the people one’s working with), the
exhilaration, the pitfalls, the shoestring budgeting, the hang-it-all moment
when the expensive thing that breaks the budget becomes a must-have, the
endless irritation of people not doing what they’re told, and the extraordinary
way all that disparity becomes (for the life of the run) a living Thing that
belongs to all those involved, that (often) is almost nothing like what you set
out to create. It is fascinating. And addictive.
Engling has put this, and more, on the page
very amusingly. It all feels very real.
There are a couple of points made in this
book which I’ll just tease out: the arts in general are very vulnerable. Fringe
theatre particularly so because it is ephemeral. When the run of the play is
over it’s forgotten, except by those few who saw it or were in it or helped
produce it. Funding is wafer thin. So people can only really afford to do it if
their family has money or they live a cold and lonely life in a garret existing
on fresh air and steam. The second point is that, no matter how Woke you are,
there should be a limit to how much you monkey about with scripts in the name
of inclusivity. Even Shakespeare. Or perhaps especially Shakespeare.
The book deals with all of this, yet manages
to make the endless problems not only funny but also resolvable. I was never
quite sure what “winning boats rise together” actually means, but I could see
that as the novel developed the self-help mantras were definitely giving Dwayne
tools which were helping him to succeed. I used to find, myself, that a very large
vodka did the trick …
If you have any interest in theatre –
especially fringe theatre – you will enjoy this.
Buy now
from: Amazon US Amazon UK
FYI:
Format/Typo
Issues:
A few missing words, mainly the easy-to-miss
little ones that scuttle off and hide when you’re not looking, but which when
present do illuminate a sentence for the reader …
Rating: ****
Four Stars
Reviewed
by: Judi Moore
Approximate
word count: 70-75,000 words
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