Ten books that get the theatre world right.
In some ways, writing fiction about theatre—or any other artistic medium—is a tricky brief. (Maybe a little like dancing about architecture.) Though plays make great occasions for exploring motley group dynamics, plays, unlike novels, are collaboratively built. Some wonderful books set on or around “the boards” don’t quite nail the unique madness that attends making a play—at least according to this actor/playwright/jerk. So I think the ones that do deserve high praise.
This week we celebrate the publication of one such. Katie Kitamura’s newest novel, Audition, is a cunning portrait of an actress orbiting two mysterious scene partners. The novel perfectly captures what’s destabilizing about performance, on and off stage.
If you’re inspired by such an excavation, here are a few more books to read that nail theatre. (And theatre people.)
Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost
This second novel from one of our most confident contemporary authors follows a theater company on the occupied West Bank as they attempt to stage a production of Hamlet. Enter Ghost captures the feeling of play-making at its idealistic best, exploring how coalitions are built across difference. Hammad beautifully considers the stakes of making art around and through profound political violence.
Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
What this jarring, boldly constructed novel nails about theatre are the dark cults of personality it tends to empower. Spoiler alert: the figure we first meet as a charismatic teacher at a performing arts high school turns out to have malevolent investment in the actor/director relationship. An excoriating look at in-the-room power dynamics, this novel examines the ways we rehearse our own trauma in attempts to understand it.
Jen Silverman, We Play Ourselves
As a feted playwright, Silverman’s got the inside scoop on their subject. We Play Ourselves is a wicked study of the unseemly aspects of professional play-making—namely, jealousy and competition. When Cass, a promising young writer, flees New York after a goofy public scandal, she’s forced to reckon with the tax of fame-chasing. Silverman’s excellent at rendering the aspirational friendships and fraught creative pairings that can undermine an artist’s better angels.
Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind
Is it cheating to include actual plays? Whatever, my list, my rules. This comedic drama from the late luminary Alice Childress depicts a cast in rehearsals for a problematic play called Chaos in Belleville. When star Wiletta Mayer—a Black actress who’s spent most of her life playing stereotypes—begins to question aspects of her poorly written role, a company-wide reckoning ensues. This terrifically readable script is set in the 1950s but you wouldn’t know it. Stay for the acid wit and a cast of cringeworthy but unfortunately recognizable players.
Jo Hamya, The Hypocrite
Hamya’s latest novel investigates the dark side of our attempts to cathart through art. When a wounded daughter writes a hit play about her novelist father’s indiscretions, she accidentally winds up risking the moral high ground. I especially appreciated the rendering of the play within this spiky book. In order t0 explore our playwright’s slightly sus motivations, Hamya pays close attention to the scenic design. One leaves theses pages with a vivid visual sense of the story our dethroned dad had to sit through.
Daniel Alarcón, At Night We Walk in Circles
This rhapsodic novel follows Nelson, the newest member of a guerilla theatre troupe in an unnamed Andean country. When he’s tapped to take on a starring role in a revival of a beloved satire, our hero’s initially elated. But reviving a violent national history quickly turns fraught. This book captures the emotional baggage that can attend explicitly political theatre-making.
Angela Carter, Wise Children
Twins on the vaudeville stage! Need I say more? This cooked-up showbiz “memoir” about chorus girl sisters is a sharp and hilarious look at a whole life—two lives, really—spent in thrall to the theatre. This classic novels nails what it looks like to stay in the game, through triumphs and failures.
Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
I’ve been meaning to reread this elegant spec-fic, but it’s taken a few years to sidle back up to the inciting incident (in which a pandemic decimates the world population). Much of the novel’s action unfolds around a traveling Shakespeare company, plying their stories a generation after the end of the old world. What St. John Mandel beautifully nails about theatre people is their delusional commitment, and the mad love that guides the enterprise. The first time I read it this book restored my faith in the power of communal storytelling.
Anne Washburn, 10 out of 12
The problem with plays is, once you pop you can’t stop. Here’s another meta entry (read: a play about people making a play), but this comedy from the madcap experimentalist Anne Washburn looks at a very specific moment in the theatre process: tech. This extremely funny ensemble study shows how time collapses and tempers rise in the hours just before a curtain goes up.
Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King
Playwright John Guare wrote the introduction to a recent reissue of this piquant social satire, which is not entirely about theatre people but does fix them in its crosshairs. A vicious lampoon of mid-century New York bohemians and all the airs they put on, Powell’s look at a star-crossed love between a married playwright and and a historian takes on all the toxic handmaidens of a life in the arts. Chiefly? Careerism. It’s a gas, though.
Who have I missed? Barry Unsworth, Evelyn Waugh, and Anne Enright entries are on my own TBR pile. But please sound off with your own books about plays below.
(You know, if you’re one of those musical theatre kids.)
