Word: accidentally
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Fifteen years ago I killed my sister." Much of Adam Rapp's Nocturne, now playing at the American Repertory Theater, is as stark as this line. The work is essentially a symphony on the theme of these words. The nameless Son is a humdrum high school student when he accidentally runs over his nine year old sister with a car. He is plucked out of obscurity to occupy the foreground of a blood red stage, where he speaks for two hours on the topic of his sister, his family and his dissatisfaction with life in general, interrupted sporadically by dialogue...
Even though there is a narrative, the play is mainly a study of a diseased mind. The Son thinks in music. He is a child prodigy at the piano, and his musings flit around the tones of baseball bats, humming power lines and clicking typewriters. But he becomes disillusioned with...
The Son turns to words to replace musical notes. He unrelentingly assaults the ear with precise metaphors, dissecting every aspect of his dead sister: her body, her dress and her words. He floods every part of his life with pregnant description. The flow does not stop even when his father...
Also in the second half the function of words changes. Words, which had been a means of drowning the self, begin to provide solace. The Son writes a basically autobiographical novel that puts him in contact with a girl who revives him to some extent. When the estranged father reads...
Yet in "Prodigal Summer" there is, despite the relaxed tone, Kingsolver's by now trademark didacticism. She does not subscribe to the view that novelists with a message ought to send a telegram. It can be no accident that three of the four main characters in the novel have worked...