Everybody To Their Own Thing

January 8, 2020 Plays TCR Daily
By Ellen Birkett Morris

CAST
Max Anderson, Age 43
Jack Hensley, Age 72
Jenny Anderson, Age 41

SETTING
The Andersons’ dining room table.
Four chairs surround the table; a place is set at each.

TIME
Present day

(Lights up on Jenny, Max enters and kisses her on her forehead).

MAX: You’re sure you don’t mind company.

JENNY: Not at all honey. It’s been a while since we had someone to dinner. It was…

(She stops herself and furrows her brow.).  

MAX: Dad. We can talk about it. I want to talk about it. It isn’t like someone just disappears when they die.

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Book Review: Know My Name

December 11, 2019 Book Review Nonfiction TCR Daily
By Rachel Zarrow

Know My Name by Chanel Miller (Viking, 2019) is the untold story of the person who the world came to know as Emily Doe, the victim of a widely reported 2015 sexual assault on Stanford’s campus. Though Know My Name is a memoir, the book is many other things—a victim’s manifesto, a story of love and loss, and a close examination of the broken systems that protect perpetrators and betray victims. Chanel Miller, the woman we meet in the pages of this book is many things too. She’s an activist, a victim, a writer, an artist, a comedian, a daughter, a sister,  a visionary, and more.

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Book Review: Family of Origin

December 4, 2019 Book Review TCR Daily
By Amy Reardon

Leave it to the generation that enjoyed a privilege and abundance fueled by post-WWII government subsidies to close the door behind them, handing their children an earth destroyed by greed, a democracy gone off the rails, and crushing student debt. Leave it then to a mind like CJ Hauser’s to capture what happens next: how the children abandoned in a dry well must set to work building for themselves a stairway of hope before they can climb out and face the serious work of healing the planet.

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TCR Talks With Catherine Ryan Hyde

November 29, 2019 Interview TCR Daily
by Leanne Phillips

Twenty years ago, Catherine Ryan Hyde’s novel Pay it Forward became an international best seller. [1] The following year, the film adaptation debuted at number four at the box office its opening weekend. The book also spawned a social movement promoting kindness, optimism, and faith in humankind. Hyde has since published thirty-six books, including a young readers’ edition of Pay it Forward, two dozen novels, and a book of travel photography based on gratitude. Her most recent novel, Have You Seen Luis Velez?, was published in May of this year.[2] A new novel, Stay, will be released on December 3, 2019.[3]

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Book Review: A Girl Goes Into The Forest

November 27, 2019 Book Review TCR Daily
By Anjali Becker

The title story of Peg Pursell’s new collection of short fiction, A Girl Goes into the Forest (Dzanc Books, 2019), opens with an unnamed girl following a male figure into the forest, “moving in the direction where perhaps she imagined the rest of her life waited. So ready for something to happen.” The “old secret cottage” they were evidently aiming for has long since collapsed, so they spend the night on the hard ground. Toward the end of the short piece, the girl thinks that eventually, “It might turn summer and she’d have survived the season.” The girl has ventured beyond whatever home she might have known and is searching for something, although what exactly that is, beyond survival, is unclear, both to her and to us. What is clear is that the stories to come will explore the emotions that drove so many young girls in the fairy tales of old to leave their safe little hamlets and to venture out into the forest of the unknown.

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Ritual Cleansing

November 22, 2019 Plays TCR Daily
By Paul K. Smith

Roles:

  • THIEF: Any age, any gender, any heritage. Projects menace.
  • CLERK: Any age, any gender, any heritage. Registers threat.
     Plaintive and Conciliatory for the first five minutes.

Place:  A convenience store in an American city.

Time:   Just before midnight

Night.  A convenience store.  Empty.  Except for the CLERK.
A big clock with a clock face – the hands show it is ten minutes to 12.   

At Rise: The CLERK is behind the counter, ritualistically wiping cans in a display, using a long feather duster.  Wiping clean  and counting familiar places in his circuit.

(Outside, a THIEF walks back & forth, fighting a temptation to go in, rob the store. Finally he goes to the unlocked door – but sees a CLOSED sign.

(The THIEF enters the store. Lots of pockets in what he wears.)

(CLERK continues to dust cans.  Watches for the big clock to release him.)

(CLERK counts out each can he dusts.) 

(THIEF watches him until the menace of his presence registers. . .)

CLERK: Forty-nine. . .

THIEF: (Menacingly:) Would be no problem to blow the back of your head off, would it?

CLERK: (Matter-of-factly:) Did you find what you need?

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Book Review: Your House Will Pay

November 20, 2019 Book Review TCR Daily
By Collin Mitchell

Ripples from the past resurface in Steph Cha’s new novel, Your House Will Pay.

At the time of the writing of this review, veteran journalist K. Connie Kang had recently died after writing about the Korean community for the the Los Angeles Times. Kang gave voice to the Koreatown community affected by the riots in the wake of the Rodney King verdict. Journalists like Kang are burdened with adhering to the idea of truth, while the creative writer can entreat memory and personal experience in finding a truth that fits within the framework of their own grief. It’s these personal stories, the prejudiced tales told within families, that Steph Cha explores in her new novel, Your House Will Pay. Through the frame of early ‘90s race-tinged LA and our current grapple with race politics and police brutality, Cha ably depicts greater Los Angeles as it is: a melded body of bedroom communities, sun-bleached strip malls, and liquor stores threaded together by a dozen distinct cultures and a violent history. It’s in this context that the book examines the idea of transgressing the familial stories we think define us and finding a part of ourselves that can separate from the past. As one character observes: “This is when shit gets permanent. The choices you make are gonna stick, they’re going to follow you.”

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