[The Saxon Muster] He Led Soldiers

Hey,

( The last few guys and a group photo )

Now I'm going to take a break from painting for a bit. I've got an idea for the next project and I've even got some figures together for it, but this time, I'll be painting in 15mm so...not little dudes so much as tiny dudes. Better give my eyes a rest.

Here's hoping these guys weren't painted in vain.

later
Tom

[The Saxon Muster] He Led Soldiers

Hey,

( The last few guys and a group photo )

Now I'm going to take a break from painting for a bit. I've got an idea for the next project and I've even got some figures together for it, but this time, I'll be painting in 15mm so...not little dudes so much as tiny dudes. Better give my eyes a rest.

Here's hoping these guys weren't painted in vain.

later
Tom

The Reviews Are In

Hey,

So with the recent Border's shutdown I was wandering around looking for some bargains. Given my growing fondness for digital media, it was hard to find anything that I really wanted in dead-tree form. The one notable exception was in the Drama section. There just aren't that many e-books for plays which I think is a notable deficiency (I'd kill to get the Folger's Library of Shakespeare on my Kindle). So the fact that the Drama section came with a steep discount let me load up on a bunch of books. And now I've plowed through the first three of them.

We start with Laugh Lines: Shore Comic Plays edited by Eric Lane and Nina Shengold. I have the odd feeling that I've read this book before, but I can't find it in any of my previous reviews. Perhaps I simply read some of the plays in other anthologies.

At any rate, the title says it all -- 10-minute comedies. There was a certain...homogeneity to these plays. A lot of them were two neurotic couples trying to work out their quirky romance over dinner in a restaurant. They all have a very similar voice to them as well. Perhaps it's a New York thing? I will say that of this bunch Check, Please, a frantic blitz of bad dates and Surprise, the perils of dating a psychic are two of the best.

Beyond that, I rather enjoyed Controlling Interest where high-powered 8 year-old executives get an offer they can't refuse and The Way of All Fish where an executive matches wits with her assistant were both very good. Everything else was OK, but didn't really grab me like the one's I've mentioned.

Next up Boston Theatre Marathon XI (2009 Anthology) edited by Kate Snodgrass. I'd never heard of this before, but apparently there really is a Boston Theatre Marathon produced by the Boston Playwright's Theatre of Boston University. It's an all-day event held in May of each year and it runs from noon to 10pm -- 50 ten-minute plays. It sounds like a lot of fun and I should make a point to go to next year's show.

So this book contains all the shows from the 2009 show. Here the plays definitely run the gamut. There are funny/sad/surreal bits and there are more distinct voices than in Laugh Lines. Among the more interesting bits we have:

• The Great Mail Robbery -- about a would-be letter writer
  
• Last Meal -- about the rituals of prison chefs
  
• Safely Assumed -- about a teenager teaching an older woman some unpleasant facts
  
• Gwen and Evelyn -- about the wife and the other woman and the man they both love
  
• Not Funny -- Why do you always gotta make a joke outta everything?
  

So that's about a tenth. There are a bunch of other plays that are pretty good although they're not to my taste and fair amount of perfectly good ones. I don't think there was much in the way of clunkers although one of them was the old "play about how I can't write a play" and that's just lazy.

But -- enough with the short form, how about a proper, full-length, three-act play?

Sounds good, how about In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) by Sarah Ruhl? Yes, how about it indeed. This was a really wonderful little play.

Oh sure, with a title like that you think you know why I'd like it right? But the play is...sweetly salacious. The play takes place in the 1880's where Dr. Givings is using the miracle of electricity to address serious cases of hysteria. The doctor keeps his offices in his house so clients will show up, go through the living room into "the next room" and receive their treatments. Dr. Givings's wife Catherine has just given birth to a baby girl, but she needs to hire a wet nurse to feed the child. She's also very curious about the mysterious buzzing sounds and noises she hears from her husband's operating theatre, but Dr. Givings doesn't want to trouble his wife with stuffy, boring, medical science.

So doctor, patient, husband, wife, mother, wet nurse all flow through the house and for many of them, Dr. Givings's treatment becomes a cure, a mystery and a key to transformation. It's a really wonderful play. It addresses a lot of serious issues with warmth and humor and compassion and most of the characters really develop over the course of the play. I liked it a lot. Definitely not "family fare", but again, not at all crude and deft with it's subject matter. It's worth reading on it's own and I hope some theatre company in the area will take a chance on it.

later
Tom

The Reviews Are In

Hey,

So with the recent Border's shutdown I was wandering around looking for some bargains. Given my growing fondness for digital media, it was hard to find anything that I really wanted in dead-tree form. The one notable exception was in the Drama section. There just aren't that many e-books for plays which I think is a notable deficiency (I'd kill to get the Folger's Library of Shakespeare on my Kindle). So the fact that the Drama section came with a steep discount let me load up on a bunch of books. And now I've plowed through the first three of them.

We start with Laugh Lines: Shore Comic Plays edited by Eric Lane and Nina Shengold. I have the odd feeling that I've read this book before, but I can't find it in any of my previous reviews. Perhaps I simply read some of the plays in other anthologies.

At any rate, the title says it all -- 10-minute comedies. There was a certain...homogeneity to these plays. A lot of them were two neurotic couples trying to work out their quirky romance over dinner in a restaurant. They all have a very similar voice to them as well. Perhaps it's a New York thing? I will say that of this bunch Check, Please, a frantic blitz of bad dates and Surprise, the perils of dating a psychic are two of the best.

Beyond that, I rather enjoyed Controlling Interest where high-powered 8 year-old executives get an offer they can't refuse and The Way of All Fish where an executive matches wits with her assistant were both very good. Everything else was OK, but didn't really grab me like the one's I've mentioned.

Next up Boston Theatre Marathon XI (2009 Anthology) edited by Kate Snodgrass. I'd never heard of this before, but apparently there really is a Boston Theatre Marathon produced by the Boston Playwright's Theatre of Boston University. It's an all-day event held in May of each year and it runs from noon to 10pm -- 50 ten-minute plays. It sounds like a lot of fun and I should make a point to go to next year's show.

So this book contains all the shows from the 2009 show. Here the plays definitely run the gamut. There are funny/sad/surreal bits and there are more distinct voices than in Laugh Lines. Among the more interesting bits we have:

• The Great Mail Robbery -- about a would-be letter writer
  
• Last Meal -- about the rituals of prison chefs
  
• Safely Assumed -- about a teenager teaching an older woman some unpleasant facts
  
• Gwen and Evelyn -- about the wife and the other woman and the man they both love
  
• Not Funny -- Why do you always gotta make a joke outta everything?
  

So that's about a tenth. There are a bunch of other plays that are pretty good although they're not to my taste and fair amount of perfectly good ones. I don't think there was much in the way of clunkers although one of them was the old "play about how I can't write a play" and that's just lazy.

But -- enough with the short form, how about a proper, full-length, three-act play?

Sounds good, how about In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) by Sarah Ruhl? Yes, how about it indeed. This was a really wonderful little play.

Oh sure, with a title like that you think you know why I'd like it right? But the play is...sweetly salacious. The play takes place in the 1880's where Dr. Givings is using the miracle of electricity to address serious cases of hysteria. The doctor keeps his offices in his house so clients will show up, go through the living room into "the next room" and receive their treatments. Dr. Givings's wife Catherine has just given birth to a baby girl, but she needs to hire a wet nurse to feed the child. She's also very curious about the mysterious buzzing sounds and noises she hears from her husband's operating theatre, but Dr. Givings doesn't want to trouble his wife with stuffy, boring, medical science.

So doctor, patient, husband, wife, mother, wet nurse all flow through the house and for many of them, Dr. Givings's treatment becomes a cure, a mystery and a key to transformation. It's a really wonderful play. It addresses a lot of serious issues with warmth and humor and compassion and most of the characters really develop over the course of the play. I liked it a lot. Definitely not "family fare", but again, not at all crude and deft with it's subject matter. It's worth reading on it's own and I hope some theatre company in the area will take a chance on it.

later
Tom