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A review by alyssabookrecs
Beat Generation by Jack Kerouac
1.0
BUCK: Well Bishop, what are we all doing here, and what strange days we live . . . . isnt that so
IRWIN: Yeah, I think we should all be ourselves sometime . . . soon as we can
Found this gem in a Half-Price Books in Minnesota. The only play Jack Kerouac ever wrote, never published or performed until it was unearthed in the early 2000s for this edition. It's not his greatest work, but it has a rhythm to it, that bop prosody he stole from Black musicians and jazz. So many quotes struck me when I least expected it, even though the play itself is hard to get through for the following reasons, which Kerouac thought were its strengths: "What I wanta do is re-do the theater and the cinema in America, give it a spontaneous dash, remove pre-conceptions of 'situation' and let people rave on as they do in real life. That's what the play is: no plot in particular, no 'meaning' in particular, just the way people are. Everything I write I do in the spirit where I imagine myself an Angel returned to earth seeing it with sad eyes as it is." Okay Kerouac, I have to disagree here on some level (there can be a plot and there doesn't need to be any particular meaning, other than people being as they are, but themes appear NATURALLY in writing in my opinion...).
But also it’d be cool to direct a diverse and inclusive version of this play just to see how it holds up onstage (not well though, I think)
IRWIN: Yeah, I think we should all be ourselves sometime . . . soon as we can
Found this gem in a Half-Price Books in Minnesota. The only play Jack Kerouac ever wrote, never published or performed until it was unearthed in the early 2000s for this edition. It's not his greatest work, but it has a rhythm to it, that bop prosody he stole from Black musicians and jazz. So many quotes struck me when I least expected it, even though the play itself is hard to get through for the following reasons, which Kerouac thought were its strengths: "What I wanta do is re-do the theater and the cinema in America, give it a spontaneous dash, remove pre-conceptions of 'situation' and let people rave on as they do in real life. That's what the play is: no plot in particular, no 'meaning' in particular, just the way people are. Everything I write I do in the spirit where I imagine myself an Angel returned to earth seeing it with sad eyes as it is." Okay Kerouac, I have to disagree here on some level (there can be a plot and there doesn't need to be any particular meaning, other than people being as they are, but themes appear NATURALLY in writing in my opinion...).
But also it’d be cool to direct a diverse and inclusive version of this play just to see how it holds up onstage (not well though, I think)