Reviews for The Unseen Hand and Other Plays

The average rating for The Unseen Hand and Other Plays based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-02-15 00:00:00 Uyoy Ufouy In the early 1980s I had my Sam Shepard phase. Nostalgia took me back to his early plays. Some fell flat. But others took me back to what I'd found so captivating. The desert settings. (In the late Seventies I went to college in California and had my own crazy escapades out in the deserts.) The mythic imagination. The food fights. The goofball mystics. Reading these plays again, I notice the religious quality, the yearning for transcendence in a cartoon world of broken cowboys and UFOs. I'm glad nostalgia took me back!

Review # 2 was written on 2009-10-21 00:00:00 Buck Nekkid "The Unseen Hand" is wonderful absurdist/expressionist drama. Three brothers who are mythological incarnations of old west figures, are confronted by a contemporary urban youth who gets alien messages via an "Unseen Hand". Kid Blue, the Cisco Kid and the Sycamore Kid have to face the viability of their own existence as mythological figures in a modern world that contains enough schizophrenia as to make them seem tame. This collection also contains three superb one-acts which won Obie awards, "Chicago," "Icarus' Children," and "Red Cross" all take on different aspects of contemporary suburban life, turning the ideas on their head in the face of unexpected situations. In "Red Cross" for instance, a man turns his back on a beautiful young wife when he suddenly and unexpectedly falls deeply in love with a sarcastic, depressed and out-of-shape cleaning lady whom he jsut met at a motel room. "Chicago" and "Icarus' Children" are also about young marrieds trying to cope with a contemporary life they find surreal. The surreal theatre of Sam Shepard fits these dark, angstful storeis wonderfully.