Shining City - Acting Edition

Reading this play was a bit like "listening" to music by simply looking at the notes on the page. I saw excerpts from this play at the Tony awards and just those short bits were far more moving than reading the play itself ,without benefit of seeing actors interpret the words and add their own movements and inflections. Don't get me wrong. This is still very moving on the page and I savored the ability to linger on particular sentences, to imagine the thoughts of the various characters. I found the interplay between a man whose wife has died and the psychiatrist he seeks to help him to be fascinating. Each character was complex and well fleshed out. But plays are essentially written in conversational form, without the added touches that a novel or short story might have, details about setting, actions, etc.. Those touches, arguably, are what make some plays seem so much flatter on the page than when presented on stage, so relatively one-dimensional. Still, this would be EXCELLENT maerial for an acting workshop and/or aspiring dramatists and it isn't a bad book...as it is...but it left me wanting more, wanting to see the production itself.

I suspect actors may love this text, as it leaves so much work for them to do, as the tension and passion so often is not in the words, but in the emotion that keeps the words from being expressed - the fear, the guilt, the anxiety - what have you. I don't find it reads very well - all the self interruption and mumbly filler words is a slog to read through, though I can imagine an actor giving it breath. My fear is that in the wrong hands it's a license to ACT!!! (Emote!!!!) From a story point of view, the ending was not a terrible shocker to me (it seemed terribly obvious it would happen at some point), my question is why when and with whom. (Read the play - it will make sense.) But, I also end up not caring about these people because it doesn't seem they much care for themselves nor the people around them.

Saw this production in NYC- McPherson is a beautiful writer with wonderful images that haunt the reader/viewer. McPherson is expert of creating tales that spin out of control... However, Shining City is... well... terribly sexist and misogynistic. On one level it is the simple story of how women/wives get in the way of straight guys who want to scew around with others ~ and gee, they are haunted by guilt... poor guys. (Are we supposed to sympathized with these jerks? How in God's name do women fall for such creeps???) The brief male/male affair may have been DRAMATIC to straight viewers,(GASP!) but this gay man just found it embarrassingly trite. C'Mon McPherson, you are capable of better ways to haunt the characters....! The theme of same sex realtionships as dramatic plot development may have worked in the 1950's... but now, no way. If this play is representitive of the way many straight men behave in long term relationships, I'm really glad i'm gay!

This is one of the better pages. I got through reading it, but now it's useless since I needed to use it to help edit for a production.

Really a play about nothing worth caring about. Goes absolutely nowhere and you forget everything about it within an hour of completing it.

Terrible dialogue to read, but apparently fantastic as a live performance. The ending made me want to re-read, but I can't put myself through that again. The symbolism really makes this story. The portrayal of anguish and confusion would be mind-blowing, I'm sure, on any stage.