Customer Reviews

World Premieres from Horse Cave: Plays by Kentucky Writers

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This is a book to relish, a collection of plays whose characters will win your heart and stay in your mind. There's Mossie, the Appalachian mountain woman who describes herself as "dumb as a coal bucket. A empty one at that," matching her wits and gumption against strip miners in Mossie and the Strippers. There's Liz, practicing the organ in a dark and dusty dairy barn at the end of County Road ZZ in Liz's Circus Story. Bennie ("a short, roundish man, age forty-five"), with his cardboard boxes of memorabilia, organizing a reunion of his old junior varsity basketball team at their high school hangout, in Beating the Varsity. And Rebecca, in The Dancers of Canaan, haunted by the death of her child - her "Possum Baby" - and striving to become "an upstandin' Shaker lady." These characters speak out of lives rooted in real places; their truths call up our own.

You'll find characters from history too: Aaron Burr, using lawyerly skills, bending his story to fend off enemies in the newspapers and the courts as he plans his questionable expedition to Mexico; John Jacob Niles, collecting Appalachian ballads while he travels as an assistant to - and becomes involved in a delicate relationship with - the photographer Doris Ullman; and Mary Todd Lincoln, plaintively explaining her need for lace curtains "when I had not a single window to hang them."

All of these stories, the imagined lives of people whose names we know and those whose names we don't, are rich with a feeling of lived history, moments of human experience caught and framed, for the stage - or to be read with enjoyment!

I find most of the plays in this compilation to be refreshing mind stimulators, with sensitive imagery, and creative reinforcement that make me smile and cry because of their enveloping essence .

I am especially moved by the vivid, environs that oft times form and connect behavioral dependence between humans and other animals captured so well in "Liz's Circus Story". Each character portrayed could be my friend too. It is amazing that one person could immerse herself into the characters so thoroughly and express it so well.

This is an excellent collection that I will not only read selections from again and again but also give as a gift.