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Playhouse: A novel - Hardcover

Bausch, Richard

 
9780451494849: Playhouse: A novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0451494849 ISBN 13: 9780451494849
Verlag: Knopf, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

From the prize-winning fiction writer Richard Bausch (“A master of the novel as well as the story . . . Effortlessly engaging” —Sven Birkerts, The New York Times), a sharp, affecting, masterly new novel about a close-knit theater community in Memphis and one turbulent, transformative production of King Lear.

As renovations begin at the Shakespeare Theater of Memphis, life for the core members of the company seems to be falling into disarray. Their trusted director has just retired, and theater manager Thaddeus Deerforth—staring down forty and sensing a rift growing slowly between himself and his wife, Gina—dreads the arrival of an imperious, inscrutable visiting director. Claudette, struggling to make ends meet as an actor and destabilized by family troubles, is getting frequent calls from her ex-boyfriend—and also the narcissistic, lecherous television actor who has been recruited to play King Lear in their fall production.

Also invited to the cast is Malcolm Ruark, a disgraced TV anchor muddling through the fallout of a scandal involving his underaged niece—and suddenly in an even more precarious situation when the same niece, now eighteen, is cast to play Cordelia. As tensions onstage and off build toward a breaking point, the bonds among the intimately drawn characters are put to extraordinary tests—and the fate of the theater itself may even be on the line.

Deftly weaving together the points of view of Thaddeus, Claudette, and Malcolm, and utterly original in its incorporation of Shakespeare’s timeless drama, Playhouse is an unforgettable story of men and women, human frailty, art, and redemption—a work of inimitable imaginative prowess by one of our most renowned storytellers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RICHARD BAUSCH is the author of twelve novels and nine volumes of short stories. He is a recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers' Award, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for his novel Peace. He is past chancellor of The Fellowship of Southern Writers, and his work is widely anthologized, including in Pushcart Prize Stories, The O. Henry Awards, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories from the South. He is on the Writing Faculty of Chapman University in Orange, California.

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Monday, June 1

(Sixty-four days to opening)

Thaddeus

Last night, Gina said, “I swear, after all these years, I’m beginning to see the actual contours of your capacity for worrying. My mother’s got nothing on you. Come on. We had a good spring, and now we’re in the money. What is it that stresses you about a new, fully funded, and expanded theater for the fall? We got King Lear in the fall. You keep expecting the other shoe to drop.”

True.

And he had gone to bed determined to do better, had kissed her, murmured “Night,” and pulled the top sheet up over his shoulders, hearing the breezes outside, and appreciating that the spring season had indeed been successful. He fell asleep almost immediately—unlike the previous five nights—and slept deeply. But the predawn hour had come with a sensation of having dreamed someone put a finger to the middle of his chest and then pushed him away, followed immediately by anxiety over the theater going dark through the whole summer season while the renovation and expansion took place. It had already been dark for nine weeks (the renovation had at last begun after several delays) and it would be dark on into August. They would have a new theater, true, and the first production would be King Lear, the one play in the world he loved most; but a whole season was a long time. People might drift away; there were so many other things to do; audiences could dwindle. The board hadn’t included him in most of its decisions as the new circumstance unfolded. He had not even met the principals, and he was the theater manager.

Not yet five o’clock. The moon was bright. From the bed, he saw tree shadows on the lawn outside the window. She slept peacefully at his side, though a train horn trailed across the dark like grief. He lay quiet and quite still. He had no memory of what had been in the dream that woke him. He drew a long breath and whispered the word he had lately taken to repeating, inwardly or aloud, like a sort of verbal amulet or charm: “Ridiculous.”

Gina stirred now, turned, and put one arm over his chest, sighing. He breathed the fragrance of her hair. When she shifted again and snuggled with her back to him, he reached for his cell phone on the nightstand and looked at the day’s news. A Norwegian cargo ship had sunk off the coast of Vietnam. Eighteen dead. “The first thing you do in the mornings,” she had also said last night, “is look at the bad news on that phone. Leave the phone at least until you’ve had some time to collect yourself.” But collecting himself meant worrying. He put the cell back down and, soundlessly as possible, rose from the bed.

Anxiety was a natural enough response to the times, wasn’t it? Well, he was a man approaching forty with a profound increasing sense of frailty and susceptibility. Ridiculous. His heart skipped a beat. He realized that was what had awakened him from whatever the dream was.

She yawned and moaned, “Not yet.”

“I’ll wake you in half an hour.”

He padded downstairs, turning on lights as he went. Opening the front door on the cool, moonlit morning, he collected The Appeal from the front stoop. (Nothing on the net would ever replace the morning paper; he was a man of certain set habits.) He put coffee on, and stood under the kitchen light, thinking of people going down in the South China Sea. He would drink the coffee and lose himself in the sports page.

On the dining room table was a collage Gina had put together made of articles that had appeared over the years, a picture history of the Shakespeare Theater of Memphis from the years on Monroe Street through the move to the converted Cotton Exchange warehouse, where it presently was. And she had laced in snippets of the magazine bios of the two women, “Cosmetics Tycoons” (as members of the company now called them), who had given all the money for renovating the place. Thaddeus sat drinking the coffee and looking at the jigsaw fragments of photos in their artful patchwork. He and Gina had met at City Stage on Monroe, in its fourth year. He was the young assistant theater manager and she was a staff member in set design. She was three years older, and sometimes teased him about that. (Lately, because she had turned forty—she was forty-one now—the teasing had gone the other way: Thaddeus would ask if she remembered when she was his age.) She had kept her last name: Donato. They were Deerforth and Donato.

She came downstairs as he was making more coffee. She had put on jeans, and a muslin top he liked, and tied her straw-colored hair back in a ponytail. She took a cup down from the cabinet and held it out for him to pour.

“Sorry I woke you,” he said.

“You didn’t wake me, dear.”

They sat across from each other at the table. She looked at the collage. “Can’t decide if I like this.”

“I’m gonna hang it in my office.”

She smiled, shaking her head, running her hand softly over a picture of the present theater with its old art deco façade, part of which had already been taken down. Members of the company had been dispersing for the summer. Gina would substitute teach art classes for a special summer program at Shelby County elementary schools. Their friend Claudette, the company’s best actor, had taken a job as a receptionist at the Williams Gallery on Main Street (though she had also scored a couple of local commercials). And the theater’s long-standing artistic director, Miles Warden, had decided to take a year’s leave of absence—which meant he would miss the fall season and the gala opening production. But he had already directed Lear, and even played him once. (“At thirty-eight,” he had told Thaddeus. “In five pounds of makeup.”) He was back in Sydney, where he was raised, to write a book about the man who raised him—his paternal grandfather. The old man had survived the Bataan Death March and went on to become a long-distance runner in the Olympics. The board had selected Reuben H. Frye, chair of the drama department at Holliwell Academy in Boston, to replace him for the fall. The board chairman’s wife had known Frye since he was her student at Harvard, where she taught literature for a few years. She had kept in touch with him. According to her, he was “preternaturally gifted” and had directed both on and off Broadway.

“Of course,” Deerforth had said at the time, “an awful lot of things in Jocelyn Grausbeck’s world are preternatural.”

The board chairman’s wife used the word a lot.

“So,” Gina had said. “The distinguished Reuben H. Frye’s been preternaturally on and off Broadway.”

“Mostly far off,” Deerforth answered, nodding with fake gravity. “Beijing.” And she laughed in that high, cackling way he loved.

The professor from Holliwell had become an aggravation.

And this was his day of arrival. He had already been pestering Deerforth on the phone and in emails about matters that couldn’t be dealt with in any case for weeks.

“Can I fry you a couple eggs?” he asked Gina now.

“Think I’ll just have this.” She held the cup to her lips. Then she indicated the paper. “There should be an article in there about the Cosmetics Tycoons. Claudette said she got interviewed, too.”

He paged through and found it under the heading “Memphis Girls.”

“Why didn’t they talk to you? You’re the theater manager.”

“It’s ‘Memphis Girls,’ babe....

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0451494849
ISBN 13 
9780451494849
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

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