Pengo's 2024 Summer Book Club

Griffin, Mark, Carrie & Howard

Over the summer I did more reading than I had in a long time, or even since, which is a pity because there is much more time in which to do it in.

A two week vacation afforded me the opportunity to read two books with a third bringing me home; no small coincidence they all had to do with the performing arts.

The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War by James Shapiro is a rather company history of the Federal Theatre Project, and how that three year government works project led, in its way, to the establishment of the House Committee on Un-American Activities which stretched from that time in the mid-1930s into the 1970s.

He’s not just documenting history, however, his main agenda is to illustrate how the lust for power and influence, rather than any particular belief or sense of duty, drives certain individuals to frighten the public with manufactured bogeymen, and to destroy those who are earnestly working in the best interests of the society as a whole in pursuit of their own hollow desires. This is as true today as it was in 1938.

While I was in Maine, I was not participating in the BorderLight Theatre Festival in Cleveland.* This is a pity, as in 2023 I was able to indulge in the festival and was thrilled by all the local artists working in and around downtown Cleveland that weekend.

This year, one of BorderLight’s international artists was Paterson Joseph, a British actor of TV and film and a veteran of the RSC. I remembered him from the absurd BBC hospital drama parody Green Wing, and, as it happens, I had also seen him play Oswald in King Lear at Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1990, when we were both much younger men.

In Cleveland this summer, he performed his monodrama Sancho & Me: One Night Only, based on the life of Charles Ignatius Sancho, a British composer (among numerous other talents and vocations) who was able, in spite of having been born on a slave ship, to rise and prosper in society. He was even the second person of African descent to vote in England.

While I was unable to see this performance, I did take advantage of an online lecture, The Art and Craft of Historical Fiction Writing, for which Joseph, speaking to us live from London (it was midnight where he was, bless him) described the process of taking a figure like Sancho, who left a scant historical record of his personal life, and building it into a fully formed character.

He referred to his own novel, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho, and when the time arrived for questions I asked about his process, adapting his novel into his script. He explained that it was, in fact, the other way around – he has performed this play for some time, and during the Covid-19 quarantine he took the opportunity to expand the work into a novel, his first.

By the time the seminar had concluded, I had already texted my wife to order a copy of the book from Loganberry Books, and they already had it in stock – because of course they did!

I was mostly through Playbook when we arrived in Friendship, but dropped it for Secret Diaries because I was in a fictional mood. It is fiction, in that there is so little known about Sancho, but it sings with truth, truth observed in it by the deep historical research conducted by the author.

Finally, I picked up a birthday gift, The Friday Afternoon Club, a memoir by Griffin Dunne. I have long appreciated the dry hipster wit of Dunne, as represented in his performances in films like An American Werewolf in London and After Hours, and have sympathized in him the life of one who strived but always feels out of place wherever he is.

The book is neatly divided in half; the first a collection of tales about privileged slackers, the second in which we take a harrowing turn into the death of his sister, and the ensuing trial of her murderer.

Then I finished The Playbook. Non-fiction, historical fiction, memoir. And since last summer, I’ve been working on my own historical fiction, which is its own kind of memoir of striving, and my own search for acceptance and meaning. 

The book by Joseph and the one by Dunne were inspirational, each in their insistence on honesty and emotional accuracy. The Shapiro book reminds me I have unfinished writing business, on a work which remains relevant and in the new year may become even more so.

*This is not entirely accurate. Talespinner Children’s Theatre remounted my stage adaptation of "The Toothpaste Millionaire" on July 27.