Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...adds, "was my feeling that the new book had to raise the stakes and include more than Bonfire, that I was obligated to write the biggest book in the world. So I spent 10 very expensive days in Japan looking for some way to get that country into the plot. And I also tried to work in some sort of television-news element and the life of an unsuccessful artist and the dealings of an unctuous insurance salesman, all of which required a lot of research and reporting and proved to be dead ends. I practically have bales of discarded...
...plot and power of the play radiate from the three MaGrath sisters, whose complex identities make their roles extremely difficult. On the surface, they are all Southern women with saccharine smiles and sweet accents. Even Meg, played by Lisa Faiman '02, who has escaped the South by moving to Los Angeles, never once loses her cultivated sense of social propriety--or her drawl. She may wear bohemian black, blaspheme her traditional upbringing and stay out all night drinking bourbon, but only because she thought she had to maintain her outer strength. Faiman's facade never cracked; her performance was seamless...
...plot is driven by Ronny's entry into Jim's life and how that entrance brings about revelations (opening up, as it were) and conciliations--between Nathan and Jim, Lily and Sara, Sara and Luke. Aptly enough for a novel about the neglected, Nathan works at the Lost Property office of the London Underground, the repository of the forgotten. Like the objects that pass through Nathan's hands, the characters stand in limbo--existing but unrecognised...
Despite the initially complicated plot, the undeniable force of Barker's style draws us in anyway. All throughout the novel, she excels in conveying an underlying rumble of disquiet, a feeling that something is imperceptibly off-kilter. Like Ronny' missing big toes, there is a sense that something profoundly important lies just out of four sight. The cadence of the sentences resound at the level of a missed heartbeat: "He turned and cut into the sandwich. The yolk was cold, and the blade was much sharper than he'd anticipated." The resonances eventually swell to an emotionally intense climax...
Though the lack of plot continuity adds comic flair to the most serious interchanges, the text of The Compleat Wrks really isn't much different than what you'd find on 10 randomly selected pages of the Riverside Edition. With men playing women, pathetic melodrama, the overuse of gaudy props (i.e. silly string which makes several repeat appearances as a vomit substitute) one begins to wonder if this isn't Shakespeare as it was meant to be. A frequent object of ridicule throughout the show are Shakespeare companies that fret about making Shakespeare accessible to modern audiences. The show suggests...