A Few Stout Individuals [Paperback]

John Guare (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2003

This latest work from award-winning playwright John Guare, author of House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, addresses ideas of history and memory, fame and ignominy, reason and insanity with his trademark Guare imagination. In a Fifth Avenue brownstone in 1880s New York, Ulysses S. Grant is penniless, dying of throat cancer, and attempting to finish his memoirs while he's cajoled and pestered by everyone from his wife and children to his publisher Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) and, via his drugged hallucinations, the emperor of Japan. Although the memoirs are eventually completed, the audience is left questioning their accuracy and, ultimately, the authenticity of history itself.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1 edition (April 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802140025
• ISBN-13: 978-0802140029
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,096,849 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An agonizing reading experience, June 5, 2004

By 

Candace Scott (Lake Arrowhead, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Few Stout Individuals (Paperback)

Ulysses Grant has been the subject of many plays in the past hundred years and two of them have actually been quite good: "Mr. Grant" by Arthur Goodrich and "Triumph" by Horace Green. In 2002, a new Grant play hit NYC and I can only thank God I never suffered through a performance. For anyone who admires General Grant, this play is an abomination, a hideous malady which bears no resemblance to the actual man, U.S. Grant. Saying that this stains his reputation is sort of like saying that in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, a small firecracker exploded.

Indeed, Guare's characterization of the General seems to have been made up out of while cloth. Grant is scarcely in the play, but when he appears in a wheelchair (which he never used), he spends his entire time ranting and railing. Repeatedly the character of Grant utters no dialogue, the stage directions merely say, "USG: rants," or, "USG: rails." Guare has Grant doing things he never did: cursing, heaping baseless ridicule his son, U.S. Grant, Jr., and carrying on in a drug-induced stupor throughout two hellishly miserable acts. The Grant in this play is drunk, drug-addicted and a babbling moron.

The historical "facts" in the play are laughable. The Grants are presented as so destitute they can't afford to purchase ice cream. Someone should have informed Mr. Guare that ice cream wasn't sold in pints in 1885, that refrigerators weren't yet invented and Grant never ate ice cream anyway. The Grant depicted here also tells people he was drunk at Cold Harbor, another blasphemous invention.

The errors in the book appear predictably throughout the play: Grant never used cannabis; he never courted his wife in Galena, Illinois; Julia Grant never called her husband "Lyssy;" (!), his daughter did not have a British accent; he never ate "calf's foot jelly" (God forbid that dish being conjured); Mark Twain never threatened to murder Grant's aide, Badeau; the sculptor Karl Gerhardt never suggested sculpting the General in the nude, and Grant's man servant was never a soldier at Cold Harbor. Perhaps a little birdie should have whispered in Guare's ear that black soldiers hadn't been integrated into the Army of the Potomac in 1864, but why bother with accuracy?

An unintentionally lucid moment occurs in the Preface, where the author candidly admits, "I don't work off research" (page ix). Gee, lucid people figured that out already on page one.

The real Ulysses Grant is a truly great story: he was a military genius but he was also a man of rare moral fiber, courage, decency and gentleness. The real story of Grant is something so much greater than this tripe that comparisons are futile. If you admire Grant, do yourself the ultimate favor and avoid this nauseating character assassination.