Novel (8 cents)

"Novel" is an 18 scene play (about 1 1/3 hours) by young American playwright Anna Ziegler that was given a reading at Theater J last night, as the first of a series of Monday night readings of plays by young American Jewish authors. There were ten actors, and ten in the audience.

This is an excellent play, I believe, about a 60 year (or so) old scientist, one year after the death of his wife, feeling that his career has been a waste, his treatment of his wife during the year she was dying from ovarian cancer insufficient, and his relationship with his two children strained. He is in Baltimore getting read to make a presentation at a conference. He is there with one of his best friends. Another conference is going on where people who hold world records are getting together: the girl who hiccupped the longest, the girl who has been scorned by the most men, the boy with the longest childhood, the man with the most near death experiences. He meets some of the attendees.

He tells his friend to go to dinner without him, that he needs to work on his presentation, but instead he is working on a novel (or the novel is working on him), and characters from the conference next door, as well as from childhood and his most recent past, waft in and out of his consciousness, sometimes being watched by him, and sometimes talking to him, or arguing with him.

The novel is not finished, his sense of frustration and futility increases.

The play is well crafted, and the flow of the dialogue between the real and (we suppose) imagained characters is seemless. The actors, who included daughter Hannah, did an excellent job.

I hope that Novel has a successful future. It is hard to see how it would miss.