Customer Reviews

Shining City

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Saw this production in NYC- McPherson is a beautiful writer with wonderful images that haunt the reader/viewer. McPherson is expert of creating tales that spin out of control... However, Shining City is... well... terribly sexist and misogynistic. On one level it is the simple story of how women/wives get in the way of straight guys who want to scew around with others ~ and gee, they are haunted by guilt... poor guys. (Are we supposed to sympathized with these jerks? How in God's name do women fall for such creeps???) The brief male/male affair may have been DRAMATIC to straight viewers,(GASP!) but this gay man just found it embarrassingly trite. C'Mon McPherson, you are capable of better ways to haunt the characters....! The theme of same sex realtionships as dramatic plot development may have worked in the 1950's... but now, no way. If this play is representitive of the way many straight men behave in long term relationships, I'm really glad i'm gay!

Reading this play was a bit like "listening" to music by simply looking at the notes on the page. I saw excerpts from this play at the Tony awards and just those short bits were far more moving than reading the play itself ,without benefit of seeing actors interpret the words and add their own movements and inflections.
Don't get me wrong. This is still very moving on the page and I savored the ability to linger on particular sentences, to imagine the thoughts of the various characters. I found the interplay between a man whose wife has died and the psychiatrist he seeks to help him to be fascinating. Each character was complex and well fleshed out.
But plays are essentially written in conversational form, without the added touches that a novel or short story might have, details about setting, actions, etc.. Those touches, arguably, are what make some plays seem so much flatter on the page than when presented on stage, so relatively one-dimensional. Still, this would be EXCELLENT maerial for an acting workshop and/or aspiring dramatists and it isn't a bad book...as it is...but it left me wanting more, wanting to see the production itself.