Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Women behaving badly, 19th century Norwegian realism edition

A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

Hedda Gabler by Herik Ibsen

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Last year I took note of the Chancellor’s review of A Doll’s House, and realized that I had never actually read the drama, in spite of my admiration for Ibsen (An Enemy of the People was a high school favorite of mine). Wanting to rectify that, and thinking it would be interesting to also revisit Hedda Gabler, I decided to read both plays back to back and see what themes they have in common. My conclusion is that a repressed woman in the 19th century […]

The Play’s the Thing

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The edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Play a Play I read is no longer in print. Hopefully this new edition is just a new cover and has not changed the work of Richard R. George . Roald Dahl introduces the play with a short introduction of how it was sent to him. The end of the play has staging, lighting and other ideas of how you can perform this version yourself. The middle is the play. It follows the movie closely in areas […]

Drama, on and off stage, and getting knickers in a twist in real life

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Raina Telgemeier is amazing and I wish she had been writing when I was a tween.  As it is, I’m happy to be able to give these books to my daughters and enjoy the nostalgia they bring me.  Her first two graphic novels are autobiographical, Smile and  Sisters.  This time around she drew from her life experiences of middle school and doing theater to create an original work titled Drama, and it has lived up to it’s name.  In 2015 Drama had the honor of being on the “Most frequently […]

Well, I think I’ll go and oil my gun.

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Opening salvo, hot take: everything Tom Stoppard has ever written is incredible; this isn’t his best work. The Real Inspector Hound is the first live production of a Stoppard play I ever saw, followed about a year and a half later by Arcadia. So, I will always be grateful to Hound for preparing me, because otherwise Arcadia might have melted my brain, and working directly with Tom (humblebrag) on The Coast of Utopia would have been the actual death of me. Hound is a delight. […]

Resonating for the last 135 years

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I first read An Enemy of the People when I was in high school and I can recall being quite moved by it. Since the phrase “enemy of the people” has been bandied about in the news lately, I thought this would be an excellent time to revisit the play. Would it be as poignant as I remembered, or would I discover that the brain of a teenager is too unsophisticated to appreciate Norwegian drama and that I’d missed the nuance? The plot is pretty much as […]

We’re all so much alike, and yet so utterly different.

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For the first 100 pages or so, this book was a literary Krispy Kreme doughnut: utterly devoid of nutritional value, but glazed in pure happiness. And then, like the best junk food, my joy immediately turned into regret, and my proverbial teeth felt like they were rotting out of my skull. Act Like It is about a man (Richard) and woman (Lainie) who star in stage production in London. He’s a celebrated actor (emphasis on the last syllable), she’s a budding young star. He’s a […]



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