Reviews for Poems You Ought to Know

The average rating for Poems You Ought to Know based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-06-10 00:00:00 Chris Barnes This one is an impressive mix of plays that includes a nice introduction touching upon each title. After reading each play, I enjoyed being able to refer back to the editor's brief commentary. After reading David Mamet's The Jade Mountain, this was particularly helpful in letting me know I didn't miss anything and that the play simply was frustratingly ambiguous. Here is Young's description: "Two men overhear the echoes from their own far-off lives in David Mamet's THE JADE MOUNTAIN. The action resonates between dream and myth, memory and factual outpost. The tea the men drink now tastes pallid compared to the musty exotic potion they conjure from the past." The one act itself provides no additional clues into what the bloody hell is really occurring between these two men. I do not typically mind digging deeply for symbolism, but if there is any embedded in this play, it is likely beneath the bedrock. Luckily, it is the only huge dud in this anthology. The book opens with Theodore Apstein's The Likeness. Set in seventeenth century Amsterdam, this might not seem a logical starting point for a late nineties anthology, but is a lovely irony piece about race and idolatry. A Jewish boy, Nathan, poses as Jesus for Rembrandt and is quickly shamed by the locals who find a Jew posing as Christ as borderline blasphemy. If you've ever scratched your head over renderings of Jesus the white hippy, this one will provide some comforting commentary. Next up is Home by Laura Cahill (mistakenly listed as Boundary County, Idaho in the table of contents). What begins as a fairly predictable character study--one of a post-divorce forty-year-old woman moving back in with her elderly mother and quickly discovering the hardships of getting along--quickly turns tragic as the mother describes a horrifying story of her own mother's familial decisions during the Great Depression. Fifteen Minutes by Dave DeCristopher is delightfully dated in that it uses the obsession of talk shows to get the point across that actual human relationships are too often seen through the distorting lens of reality television...wait...I suppose that's not dated at all. In this one, a spurned woman broaches the subject of her husband's infidelity by hosting a talk show in her bedroom in the middle of the night, but seems more interested in ensuring her audience's interest, despite the fact that her audience consists of only a single overzealous neighbor. No Crime by Billy Goda was one of my favorites in the collection and tells the story of a young lawyer applying at a firm and answering all the right hypothetical questions about what type of despicable clients he might have to defend only to find that the questions he is answering might soon become his reality. How often do people "talk the talk" just to "land the gig," but fold under the pressure of the actual gig? I Dream Before I Take the Stand by Alene Hutton features a police interrogator and a rape victim who is forced (key word) to recount her victimization in such a way that abjectly dehumanizes her in front of the audience. It's in-your-face and will require a breather afterward, but displays its message beautifully. The woman, very carefully presented without a name, goes from being viewed as completely innocent to the stereotypical "She was asking for it, wearin' that outfit!" in a matter of minutes. The result is harrowing. Reverse Transcription by Tony Kushner is jammed with seven main characters, all playwrights, attempting to illegally bury their dead friend in a swanky, celeb-housing cemetery. The premise promises hilarity, but unfortunately it's too packed with people to be enjoyable in the short time frame. Kushner does attempt to make light of this by relaying to the audience that this ten minute play will be nearly twenty minutes long unless the playwrights can speed through their lines, but that is not enough to make it worthwhile. What Drove Me Back to Reconsidering My Father by John Ford Noonan proves, like others in this collection (most notably Home and Fifteen Minutes), that the kind of stories that might be viewed as clichéd dramatic character pieces can be imbued with distinctive originality and thus become fresh. In this play, a woman writes a one-act play about her relationship with her father and is rehearsing with a doll that has been designed to eerily resemble her dad. While rehearsing with the doll, her father phones her and the two attempt reconciliation for previous neglect; however, the doll, which eventually comes to life (at least in the mind of the woman), gets the last and probably the most grounded word. Dues-X by Jules Tasca tells the story of an evangelical television preacher, his equally zealous wife, and their atheist scientist brother. The brother discovers the religious gland of the brain and invents a drug that shrinks it entirely, rendering anyone who ingests the drug an immediate ardent atheist. The beauty of the piece lies in the power play of both the religious and the non-religious who stop at nothing to render the other's belief system as meaningless. But when one side is won over, can this truly be called a victory? Bounty County, Idaho by Tom Topor is basically a monologue in which the male chauvinist, racist, backwoodsman protagonist goes from being amusingly naïve to threatening as he is interviewed by a Jewish newswoman. His speech not very amusingly stereotypes himself, but if one pays close attention to the way he presents his weaponry to the woman, one can imagine an alternate denouement that satisfies the feeling of being unfairly judged. Finally, the quick-witted dialogue of All About Al by Cherie Vogelstein sells the piece. It characterizes Gil, a "man's man" who takes what he has, his girlfriend Allison (Al) for granted, and the awkward Lenny, who desires any kind of loving relationship and is bemoaning a possible suicide since he just broke up with his own girlfriend. Gil plans on breaking up with Al, which of course perks Lenny up, but as the two continue to talk, it becomes clear that neither man knows what he wants, outside of the facade of human interaction. This anthology is a quick read, imbued with a lot of original characterizations that might be unoriginal if placed in other playwright's hands. There is plenty here that is worth sharing with others, if only for the unique staging elements required to visualize the stories.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-28 00:00:00 Javin Hope A fine collection of essays. Offers good historical perspective (recent history). I did not enjoy the short story section as much.