Side Man: A Play [Paperback]

Warren Leight (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 8, 1999

Lauded by Peter Marks of The New York Times as "powerfully unsettling…an enormously moving play," Side Man is the comic and tender story of Clifford, a young man who looks back on his family life; prior to leaving home, Clifford reconciles the role that he has long played as parent to his parents. Smoothly gliding between present and past, the play tells the story of a time before the Beatles and Elvis, when jazzmen were heroic like ballplayers and there was no shortage of Saturday-night gigs. Side Man is both a tribute to the men whose lives were their music and a sober look at a family drama left in the wake of that passion.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Lauded by Peter Marks of The New York Times as "powerfully unsettling . . . an enormously moving play," Side Man is the comic and tender story of Clifford, a young man who looks back on his family life. Prior to leaving home, Clifford reconciles the role that he has long played as parent to his parents. Smoothly gliding between present and past, it tells the story of a time before The Beatles and Elvis, when jazzmen were as heroic as ball players and there was no shortage of Saturday night gigs. Side Man is both a tribute to the men whose lives were their music and a sober look at a family drama left in the wake of that passion.

"Side Man is a work in the great tradition of The Glass Menagerie and Long Day's Journey Into Night." -Donald Lyons, The Wall Street Journal

"Side Man is a memory play with a difference. For it is not simply the story of its first-person narrator, a young man called Clifford, and his tortuous relations with his father, Gene, mother, Terry, and their circle, but also the story of a lost era in American popular music: the rise, decline and fall of the big bands. . . . This truly is a play to conjure with, a play to hold you engrossed at the time, but then offer you a reflective aftertaste, leaving you savoring, with nostalgic regret, the diminution of a peculiarly American art form."-Clive Barnes, New York Post

"Leight does full justice both to the sordid side of the jazz world and to the moments of pure joy that the players experience when they 'keep time so well it stood still for them.'"-Fintan O'Toole, New York Daily News

Warren Leight won Newsday's George Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Playwright, and the George and Elisabeth Marton Playwriting Award for Side Man. He is also the author of Stray Cats and The Loop, and he wrote the book for the musical Mayor. He has written for such publications as Rolling Stone, Mademoiselle, and The Village Voice, and was a contributing editor to National Lampoon.

About the Author

Warren Leight is a Tony award winning playwright. He is known for his films Stuck on You! and The Night We Never Met. Other plays he is known for are No Foreigners Beyond This Point and James and Annie. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 82 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st edition (January 8, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802136222
• ISBN-13: 978-0802136220
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #974,289 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Play this Year, June 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Side Man: A Play (Paperback)

I have seen this play on Broadway and was spellbounded. This play is amazing. It really graspes reality. This play connects with famalies, such as mine, across the globe. It is beautifully written and deserved every Tony award that it recieved. Leight is amazing and does not bore you, does not offend you, and does not discomfort you in this all too true play. "Side Man" is magnificent and is surely the best play this year.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "All In The Family", May 21, 2001

By 

Stanley H. Nemeth (Garden Grove, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Side Man: A Play (Paperback)

In the tradition of the most distinguished American plays ("Long Day's Journey" and "Glass Menagerie" specifically) Warren Leight reveals the modern family as at once the oddly comic locus of expectations unfulfilled and (in the words of G.B. Shaw) "the greatest instrument of torture the human race has yet devised." There are two sorts of side men in this brilliant play: the jazz musicians who accompany the more stellar performers but live principally for their music nonetheless, and the family members whom they shove off to the margins of their lives as inconsequential side men in comparison to their more important art and male camaraderie. By turns painful and hilarious, the play is altogether worthy of the praise the critics have accorded it. My judgments stem from a reading of the text and from the pleasure of having seen the piece recently performed on the stage.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A jazz masterpiece for the American stage., October 12, 2000

By 

Peter Carrozzo (Flushing, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Side Man: A Play (Paperback)

Warren Leight's brilliant salute to the jazz musicians of his youth. Leight creates a world long past where jazz musician be-bopped their way into immortality among the select few who "got it" in their small jazz world. It is a world of gigs until dawn with legendary musicians, passing joints, unemployment lines, and speaking not words but chords and riffs. Depicted as the casualties of this world are the neglected familes of these musicians ignored as outsiders and civilians.

The playwright easily glides through time (one moment in the present, the next moment thirty years in the past)with the ease of Arthur Miller.

One senses loss in the fading of these jazz gods--like cowboys or Sioux warriors. It is a sad lament to a bygone era in American music. Please do not miss the experience of reading this requiem for that legendary moment in time.