Still by Jen Silverman
My rating: 3/5 cats
fulfilling book riot’s read harder challenge 2018 task #15: a one-sitting book
yop, i think this pretty much clinches it—i was not put on this earth to appreciate plays.
i read a couple last year* when their titles piqued my interest at the book factory; The Pitchfork Disney and Knives in Hens, and then another—Written for You, at the request of the playwright himself, and i had the same reaction to all three of them; the sense that i was reading words, but nothing was really sticking, you know?
and then some dude named nick popped onto my thread for The Pitchfork Disney, suggesting i read this play, which his own review praises as One of the most beautiful pieces of literature I’ve read, a suggestion i remembered on the day i went to work without remembering to pack the book i was reading when scrambling to get ready in the weary-bleary darkness of 3.am (and people—the predawn commute is not one you want to forget your reading material for—it is not the ideal hour to be making eye contact with strangers on the nyfcmta), so i decided to pluck it from the shelf during my break and see if it would engage me.
and it just…didn’t. is it me? is it really just down to the script format? is it the quality of the play itself?
Still doesn’t have a ton of ratings here on goodreads, but those it does have are pretty positive: 9 five-stars, 7 four-stars, 3 three-stars (one of which is mine) and nothing lower than that.
in the world *outside* of goodreads, it won the 2013 DC Horn Foundation/Yale Drama Series Prize, which sounds prestigious, and its synopsis praises it as “darkly comic” as well as “poignant, lyrical, ingeniously absurd…outrageously funny,“ and “brave and remarkable.” which, i know—a publisher praising its own book is about as objective as a parent praising their own child, but a publisher has more veto power over its progeny than a human does, once emerged. it is frowned upon when parents consign their children to the slush pile.
so it’s either me not liking plays or me not liking this play, and i think it really is down to the format. plays just slide right off of me.
i only have 45 books on my “plays” shelf, and to return to the ranking-stat, only 5 of them were given five-stars cats by me, although there’s also only a single two-star cat (and no one-stars cats because i’m not rude).
so i think i’m just medium on plays in general.
scripts are all dialogue, which increases reading pace unless an effort is deliberately made by the reader to regulate it, and i don’t, so plays just gliiiiide by my speedy eyes without digging in and it might be why the plays i have enjoyed have mostly been the olde timey shakespeare and greek stuff, where i’m more conscious and mindful of what i’m reading because of the need to take historical context into consideration and the slowing-down effect and poetic gravitas of an antiquated vocabulary and syntax, etc, while the modern drama i’ve read is much snappier, conversational, more weighted towards presenting a situation than the richness of its language. maybe this play/plays in general are better appreciated as performances, although i fell asleep halfway through the last play i went to, so that idea doesn’t work either.
who knows—you’d think that a play in which there is a character named constantinople who is a newborn/stillborn baby played by an adult male actor stage directed to be slippery, as unclothed as possible, unearthly, disturbing, and charming, would be right up my alley, but nope.
and i know i’ve gone and written a “review” that’s more an examination of “why i don’t like plays” than an actual review of *this* play, but sometimes that’s what happens when me and a book completely fail to connect.
but at least it counts towards fulfilling one of my book riot/read harder challenges!
* or “in 2016” because—wow, time flies.
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