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| Eugenie Carabotsos |
In that time I have not only had my eyes open to the wide variety of new work being created by modern American playwrights, but I've even made some friends.
For Wednesday, I read We Will Not Describe the Conversation by Eugenie Carabatsos.
My only experience with Dostoevsky's novel Crime & Punishment was the compact, 90-minute stage adaptation for three actors, written by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus that played the Cleveland Play House a little over ten years ago.
Carabotsos takes her inspiration from one passing phrase in Dostoevsky's book to apply that writer's theory about human nature to the 21st century.
The Russian novelist foresaw the horrors of the near-future, of those who would believe our race divided between the men and the Super-men, and to ensure that the Cro-Magnon finally kill the last Neanderthal.
What resonates in this new work is the modern belief that we are right (whoever we are) and that they are wrong (whoever they are) and that our rightness justifies any action, and any statement. There are no disagreements, there are no differences of opinion, there is right and there is wrong. And it is this sense of being right that makes one superior to the other.
We are free to define our own reality, and in that definition we reign supreme. Carabotsos describes our society, one in which paranoia and alienation dominate our actions.
Who should I read tomorrow?
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