AllPhoneDeals.com

Love it

Customer Rating:
I love this series of play collections - I own pretty much all of the books by these editors. I use them all the time to find good contemporary material I can perform for class and auditions. This is my most recent read, and there was some really fun stuff in it. I created a monologue from a character's dialogue in one of the plays, which I used for an acting showcase, and I got a LOT of laughs - dare I say the most laughs of the night. Anyway, these are enjoyable to read, fun to draw material from, and interesting to perform. Recommended.

great for audition pieces

Customer Rating:
I got this book for my son, who is an acting student in a conservatory program. His summer assignment was to find a comic and dramatic monologue and this book has been invaluable. He has recommended it to several of his classmates, because the quality of the pieces is so strong. Shengold and Lane did an amazing job finding comic works. Bravo!

love it

Customer Rating:
From the surreal to the silly, this collection is sublime. Shengold and Lane have delivered yet another delightful anthology. Highly recommended!
S. Harden

Well, *I* think they're very funny...

Customer Rating:
... and so do a number of my students, to whom I've recommended this book as they look for material. Sure, I have my favorites among them -- and they don't ALL work for me -- but I think Shengold and Lane have done a real service by collecting off-beat and very hip material. I look at scene anthologies all the time, and this one is among the freshest and sharpest I know. If you're an actor looking for comic material, I recommend it highly!

Frown Lines

Customer Rating:
Dying is easy, comedy is hard. We've all heard that line, haven't we? Yes, death is very easy. This book compiles examples of comic playwrights falling dead left and right.

Editors Land and Shengold desperately wanted to pack thirty-six comic poems into one 500-page book. Well, they won at that gamble. This collection of one-acts, ten minute plays, and skits weighs in at a modest page count and a reasonable price. I read the whole thing in two nights, and I read it again over the next two nights. What I didn't do much was laugh.

Many of these plays desperately want you to know they're funny. Plays like O'Donnell's "There Shall Be No Bottom" and Lindsay-Abaire's "How We Talk In South Boston" desperately wave in your face what wacky fun they are. They're practically doing jazz hands and yelling wokka-wokka to get you to laugh. And like a Borscht Belt comedian who can't hold a crowd, the harder they try to make you laugh, the more you want to flee.

Other plays are supposed to be funny, but I'm forced to take that on faith. Leight's "Mars Has Never Been So Close" and Strand's "Rosa's Eulogy" feel more like finger exercises for writers than anything a producer would want to subsidize. There are plays by some recognized names like Steve Martin and Shel Silverstein that I can only imagine made it between these covers because the authors are famous names.

In fairness there are a few plays that are actually funny. Jonathan Rand's "Check, Please" and Elaine May's "The Way of All Fish" trust their characters and their audience enough to venture forward, expecting us to know real humor when we see it. Some of the really funny plays are smart enough to avoid relying on jokes as such, and others use smart, incisive jokes that don't try to desperately signal what a pack of cards they are.

But the truly funny plays are swimming in the midst of the plays that ring false. There are just too few of them to be worth the cost of the book. If you're a director or a producer looking for a comic play to stage, don't waste your time on this book. It's not what you're looking for. Because compiling putatively funny books is easy. Comedy is hard.