Author: Brian J. Noggle

Like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, I bought this book for $2.00 at the St. Charles Book Fair in that orgy of hardback buying that’s populated the top of my sole to-read shelves with overflow of unrelated tomes. Since I’m in the midst of a long nonfiction hardback to be reported later, I picked this book up for a quick bit of levity in between.

As some of you know (all of you who aren’t dammkidz), Neil Simon was a prolific playwright circa the later middle decades of the twentieth century. Many of his plays were even made into movies. Oddly enough, I have a sort of cultural touchstone with this particular piece from that era; my brother, as a boy, received upon him the schtick that he was a button collector, and he had a I Ought To Be In Pictures button, no doubt reminiscent of the time where this play travelled to the Melody Top or the Riverside Theatre in Milwaukee. But I bought the book because I wanted more drama in my life, not some envy of my brother’s button collection. I think I stole inherited it, anyway, when either he needed some money in high school or when he abdicated many of his worldly possessions when joining the Marines.

The play is a simple two act with three characters: a nineteen year old New York girl who arrives at the door of her father’s California bungalow sixteen years after he abandoned her; the almost-failure screenwriter father; and his movie business girlfriend with some substance. The action takes place in the bungalow and deals with the daughter who wants to be in pictures… or maybe just wants to reconcile with the father she never knew.

It’s a short play, and a simple conceit. I liked it enough, but perhaps if I spent too much time on it, I would think it too facile or not complex enough to speak truth to power. Perhaps Simon ain’t Shakespeare. But in 1602, Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare, either.

Books mentioned in this review:

You know, the St. Louis Reperatory Theatre put on this play last year, and I didn’t have the inkling to go. I mean, face it, I hear Steven Woolf on the radio hawking the shows, and his forced enthusiasm kills any I might feel about a play. I mean, this one is a musical, and everybody knows how I feel about musicals (hint). So I didn’t go, and reading the book, I’m sorry I didn’t.

I picked this book club edition for a couple bucks at one of the book fairs I attended this summer. I think it was St. Charles, but come on, St. Charles, St. Louis, Kirkwood, Belleville, Webster Groves….they’re all beginning to blend together. I’m not reading the books fast enough to keep their origins fresh.

Aside from that, let’s dwell on the fact that this is a book club edition. Now, I’ve done my turns with the Book of the Month Club and the Quality Paperback Club (and the Writers’ Digest Book Club) beginning in the 1990s, but they didn’t offer contemporary plays. Is there a Broadway Book Club out there, or is this disappearance representative of the death of middlebrow culture? I mean, not to put too fine of a point on it, where has drama-loving middlebrow culture gone? In the olden days, plays and theatre were cheap and popular entertainment, with stars accountable to their audiences both in their performance and their lifestyles. Now, our popular entertainment is phoned in from somewhere else, delivered via unresponsive screening technologies by stars who don’t know their ultimate audiences, but feel contempt for them. What happened? Oh, yeah, theatre tickets stopped selling for a penny and snotty little English and Drama majors started getting uppity, using the rarification of their academic experience to distance themselves from the dirty, unthinking (or wrong thinking) plebes. Probably more of the former than the latter.

This particular work breaks down the fourth wall in a rather interesting fashion. It does the normal play-within-the-play thing as well; the story revolves around the last, unfinished work of Charles Dickens as presented by a turn-of-the-century British troupe. Ergo, all actors are playing actors playing characters in the play. Throughout, the Edwin Drood action stops as the drama personnel of the British troupe make asides, discuss their parts, and so on. Ultimately, the British troupe asks the audience to help finish off the play, as Dickens died before revealing the Solution of Edwin Drood.

So the play, this play, the Mystery of Edwin Drood, offers a novel and amusing presentation of several conventions and must be very interesting to see in performance, except now I know all possible endings. It’s like watching Clue: The Movie over and over again even when the mystery is gone. Come to think of it, I do that, too, so I guess I’d go see a production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood if I got the chance.

As far as the St. Louis Reperatory Theatre goes, I guess I’ll make my way over there, too, and give Steven Woolf the benefit of the doubt. Especially since we’ve moved to Old Trees, Missouri, and now we’re so close to it that I sometimes bang my shin into Loretto-Hilton Center when trying to find the bathroom in the dark.

Books mentioned in this review:

I picked this book up at the Kirkwood Book Fair because I recognized the local author’s name from the Big Sleep Books, and this book was a First Edition/First Printing. For a dollar. You cannot do wrong, can you?

Well, it’s a child snatch book, and although it’s not Nightmare in Manhattan, I didn’t care for it that much. I’m just not big on that particular plot thing. Perhaps I just don’t have the same nightmares as most parents, but I don’t have an automatic investment in child snatch books, even if there’s the scandalous confrontation of child molestation! It hearkens me back to my single visit to a starting writers’ group in my former suburb, where it was me, a couple of “poets,” and a number of old ladies all writing books on child molestation. It creeped me out, I kid you not.

The book is a serviceable genre piece, though, and worth a buck if you can find it. It did, however, alert me to Mayhaven Publishing and its annual novel competition. Boy, novel competitions are starting to look good to me as far as publishing my last novel are concerned.

Books mentioned in this review: