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Summary
Summary
From the prize-winning fiction writer Richard Bausch ("A master of the novel as well as the story . . . Effortlessly engaging" -Sven Birkerts, The New York Times) , a sharp, affecting, masterly new novel about a close-knit theater community in Memphis and one turbulent, transformative production of King Lear .
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.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
A novel about a Memphis theater company envelops onstage classical tragedy within offstage domestic farce. Like a playbill, the novel opens with a "Cast of Characters," beginning with "The Three Main Characters" and followed by "And the People Around Them." The three principals are Thaddeus Deerforth, general manager of the Shakespeare Theater of Memphis; Malcolm Ruark, a recently disgraced local TV news anchor--turned-thespian; and Claudette Bradley, one of the company's principal actors. Each of them has a troubled marriage--two recently ended, and one looks increasingly shaky. Further complicating their stories, as they prepare for their newly renovated theater's grand relaunch with King Lear, are issues of alcoholism and substance abuse, aged parents with dementia, sexual impulses they find difficult to understand and control. The people around them number a few dozen, and it's tough to keep them straight even with the cast list, but they include a couple of aging lechers--a visiting director from academe and a lead actor known from a Netflix series--who bring plenty of their own issues and have trouble adjusting to Memphis culture, and a pair of billionaire donors, the "Cosmetics Tycoons," who are funding this attempt to put Memphis on the map of world-class theater cities. What could go wrong? The romantic entanglements, past and present, can be impossible to predict and tough to keep straight, while the dramatic production itself must please the billionaires, impress the city, and manage to keep people who can't stand each other working together. Outwardly, some of the plot verges on slapstick, but inwardly, there is quiet desperation. "He began wanting a fight," Bausch writes of one character at a pivotal juncture. "Something to bring it all to a head, some sort of catharsis. But he wouldn't act on it." So the reader also waits for some catharsis, or something to happen, to move this plot and these characters forward. If only these characters could decide whether "to be or not to be," but that's a different tragedy. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
