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3.5 

Playhouse

By Richard Bausch
Playhouse by Richard Bausch digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

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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4 Reviews

3.5
“This book took a bit of getting into for me, and I had convinced myself it was pretentious about 1/4 of the way through the book. I’m a theater nerd, so I picked it up based solely on the name, but almost put it down several times because I simply don’t understand Shakespeare. Then I suddenly found myself caring about what happened to each of the main characters. The characters were masterfully written. Each had unique strengths and flaws that amounted to a group of tightly knit friends and foes that I felt a sort of kinship towards. I’d have rated this four stars based on the surprise ending, but I had some trouble getting into the first bit of the story; it simply didn’t catch my interest at first.”
“i really liked this.”

About Richard Bausch

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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