Review by Booklist Review
Novels about contemporary stagings of classic plays, such as Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed (2016), Meg Wolitzer's The Uncoupling (2011), and Adam Langer's Cyclorama (2022), contrast epic social changes with timeless aspects of the human condition. Fiction virtuoso Bausch's psychologically lush and situationally entangled tale is catalyzed by the building of a glitzy Globe Theater in Memphis and its ambitious, inevitably stormy opening production of King Lear. This endeavor forges highly problematic relationships, bringing back together the former husband of one of the two philanthropists funding the venture--his ex-wife and her wife--and a former TV anchor struggling with alcoholism and disgrace over an allegedly inappropriate involvement with his underage niece-by-marriage, who is also appearing onstage. Add a visiting artistic director with attitude, bad ideas, and his own woes; the imperiled marriage of the set designer and the general manager; and a leading actor who has just taken her dementia-afflicted father out of an assisted living facility against her family's wishes. Profound turmoil ensues, driven by conscience, longing, gossip, guilt, anguish, rage, and sexual assaults, all taking place in a vibrantly depicted city assailed by nature's fury. With Shakespearean moments of confusion, regret, and dissemblance, sharp-witted banter and all-out showdowns, Bausch's enthralling, tempestuous, empathic drama illuminates with lightning strikes paradoxes of family, loyalty, and love.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bausch (Before, During, After) delves into the dramas of a Memphis theater company in his intriguing if slow-going latest. While the Shakespeare Theater plans a production of King Lear to fund a lavish ongoing renovation, the lives of the main characters fall apart. Theater manager Thaddeus Deerforth's wife, Gina Donato, the company's chief set designer, considers ending their marriage, and Thaddeus wonders if her closeness to Reuben Frye, the visiting director in charge of their Lear, is to blame. Longtime lead actor Claudette Bradley is struggling to care for her father, a retired history teacher with memory loss, when her increasingly erratic actor ex-husband returns to Memphis after failing to find work in Los Angeles. There's also former TV anchorman Malcolm Ruark, who lost his job after he caused an accident while driving drunk with his underage niece Mona Greer. Now divorced and unemployed, Malcolm attempts to start fresh by accepting a role in the play, but his efforts are complicated when Frye casts Mona as Cordelia. As Thaddeus, Claudette, and Malcolm reimagine their lives, the theater's reconstruction comes to an unexpected end. Despite a meandering start, the novel offers a rewarding homage to both literary and human drama. It's a little slack, but even so this will have special appeal to theater lovers. (Feb.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this latest from Rea Award winner Bausch (Living in the Weather of the World), a fictional professional theater company based in Memphis is slated to produce King Lear in its newly renovated playhouse. Thaddeus, the company's managing director, juggles demanding donors, guest directors, and mercurial actors while coping with a heart condition and the growing distance between him and his wife Gina, the company's resident set designer. Claudette, an actress, fends off the advances of the lecherous TV actor cast as Lear, while also trying to manage care for her ailing father and her relationship with an off-kilter ex-husband. Malcolm, a disgraced local TV anchor cast in the production, struggles to rebuild his life. Overstuffed with characters and subplots, the narrative takes too long to convey any sense of the camaraderie and joy in the creative process that is a key part of theater making. Up until the point where a tragedy upends everything, readers mostly get scenes of sniping, bickering, and outright cruelty among a group of mostly unhappy and unpleasant characters. VERDICT Set in the early 2010s, prior to the #MeToo era, Bausch's novel seems to be saying something about predatory men, but it's unclear where he stands on the subject, and there is no real payoff to that story thread.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book 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.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
