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As renovations begin at the Shakespeare Theater of Memphis, life for the core members of the company seems to be falling into disarray. Their trusted director has just retired, and theater manager Thaddeus Deerforth—staring down forty and sensing a rift growing slowly between himself and his wife, Gina—dreads the arrival of an imperious, inscrutable visiting director. Claudette, struggling to make ends meet as an actor and destabilized by family troubles, is getting frequent calls from her ex-boyfriend—and also the narcissistic, lecherous television actor who has been recruited to play King Lear in their fall production.
Also invited to the cast is Malcolm Ruark, a disgraced TV anchor muddling through the fallout of a scandal involving his underaged niece—and suddenly in an even more precarious situation when the same niece, now eighteen, is cast to play Cordelia. As tensions onstage and off build toward a breaking point, the bonds among the intimately drawn characters are put to extraordinary tests—and the fate of the theater itself may even be on the line.
Deftly weaving together the points of view of Thaddeus, Claudette, and Malcolm, and utterly original in its incorporation of Shakespeare’s timeless drama, Playhouse is an unforgettable story of men and women, human frailty, art, and redemption—a work of inimitable imaginative prowess by one of our most renowned storytellers.
Cover images: The Storm (detail) by Georges Michel. The Art Institute of Chicago; (theater seats) Paleha/Getty Images
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 14, 2023 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593665534
- File size: 453825 KB
- Duration: 15:45:28
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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December 19, 2022
Bausch (Before, During, After) delves into the dramas of a Memphis theater company in his intriguing if slow-going latest. While the Shakespeare Theater plans a production of King Lear to fund a lavish ongoing renovation, the lives of the main characters fall apart. Theater manager Thaddeus Deerforth’s wife, Gina Donato, the company’s chief set designer, considers ending their marriage, and Thaddeus wonders if her closeness to Reuben Frye, the visiting director in charge of their Lear, is to blame. Longtime lead actor Claudette Bradley is struggling to care for her father, a retired history teacher with memory loss, when her increasingly erratic actor ex-husband returns to Memphis after failing to find work in Los Angeles. There’s also former TV anchorman Malcolm Ruark, who lost his job after he caused an accident while driving drunk with his underage niece Mona Greer. Now divorced and unemployed, Malcolm attempts to start fresh by accepting a role in the play, but his efforts are complicated when Frye casts Mona as Cordelia. As Thaddeus, Claudette, and Malcolm reimagine their lives, the theater’s reconstruction comes to an unexpected end. Despite a meandering start, the novel offers a rewarding homage to both literary and human drama. It’s a little slack, but even so this will have special appeal to theater lovers.
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