|
The Dazzle and Everett Beekin
|
| Price: | $16.00 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details |
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com
18 new or used available from $6.42
Average customer review:
Product Description
In The Dazzle, Richard Greenberg takes on the story of the Collyer brothers, legendary New York eccentrics who, following their deaths in 1947, were found to have collected more than 136 tons of trash within their grand but crumbling Harlem manse. As depicted by Richard Greenberg, Langley and Homer Collyer are consumed by their obsessions—Homer reveling in telling tall tales, Langley captured by the “dazzle” of images contained within objects—in this “beautiful, disturbing, shockingly funny and profoundly humane play by a masterful dramatist” (Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times).
Everett Beekin explores the tensions between the safety of family and the yearning for a larger life through the relationships of two sets of Jewish sisters. Set in the 1940s, Act One opens with Anna and Sophie dining in their mother’s Lower East Side tenement, bickering over the presence of their sister Miri’s Gentile suitor, Jimmy. In Act Two, fifty years later, Anna’s daughters Nell and Celia meet on a California beach before the wedding of Nell’s daughter Laurel. Linking the generations is the name Everett Beekin—Jimmy’s business partner and, later, Laurel’s prospective bridegroom Everett Beekin VIII. As the play unfolds, Everett Beekin becomes “a haunted, restless meditation on American rootlessness” (Ben Brantley, The New York Times).
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #844979 in Books
- Published on: 2003-04-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 208 pages
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Richard Greenberg is the author of Take Me Out (Faber, 2003) and several other plays. He lives in New York City.
Customer Reviews
You Can't Win Them All
"The Dazzle" is so much fun to read. The play is about an Abbott and Costello-type set of brothers whose eccentricities lead finally to tragedy but who, in the meantime, offer up some brilliant banter on the order of Oscar Wilde. There is the mild-mannered brother who is the 'normal' one, and then the flamboyant pack-rat whose horde of trash finally does him in. Based on the the true story of the Collyer brothers of NYC, this play offers a wonderful, witty, but finally sad entertainment. "Everett Beakin", on the other hand, offers two plays in one: the first act is a kind of Jews-the-ghetto set piece on the order of The Honeymooners, while the second act set in affluent Orange County, California is about the grandkids fifty some years later. You get to decide who is more obnoxious. Both function as related skits leading to some sort of profound statement which I am not smart enough to figure out. A pretentious dud.
