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The Action Against Sol Schumann
The Action Against Sol Schumann
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Author: Jeffrey Sweet Publisher: Dramatists Play Service (cover may change) Format: Softcover # of Pages: 67 Pub. Date: 2003 Edition: Acting ISBN-10: 0822219492 ISBN-13: 9780822219491 Cast Size: 4 female, 5 male (doubling)
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About
the Play:
The
Action Against Sol Schumann has become a favourite of acting
teachers for Male Monologues.
The
Action Against Sol Schumann is a full-length drama by Jeffrey
Sweet. Aaron sees a sharp line between right and wrong. His
brother Michael isn't as sure. Then, the U.S. government files
shocking charges against their father, an aging Jewish Holocaust
survivor, and their world is turned upside down. Past crimes, the
fine line between guilt and innocence and memories of the Holocaust
are examined in this political drama.
The
Action Against Sol Schumann concerns charges brought against a
Brooklyn Orthodox Jew by the U.S. Office of Special Investigations.
His family is shocked by the allegations against Sol, a Holocaust
survivor. Sons Michael (who is assimilated) and Aaron (active in
Jewish causes) have differing responses. This play dramatizes the
impossibility of rewriting the past and the painful insufficiencies
of trying to make amends, or even explaining their necessity. As told
by the Chicago Tribune: "Jeffrey Sweet's
deeply felt and profoundly moving new play confronts its characters,
and its audience, with a complex moral dilemma. Sol Schumann, a
devout American Jew and beloved father of two grown sons, in 1985 is
accused of unspeakable crimes he allegedly had committed many years
earlier. That is all the story you need to know or should know, for
part of the strength of Sweet's drama is the surprising twists and
turns it takes in its plot, character, psychological and moral
development. Like his earlier drama The Value of Names this is a
tale, loosely based on a real case, of children and parents. It tells
of the bond that links them and of the gulf that separates them. And
though Sol Schumann is the title character, the two central forces of
the drama are his sons, who in the course of tracking through the
maze of legal, moral and personal issues on the sins of their father,
also must come to terms with their relationships with him as their
father's children. An unusually thoughtful and provocative script,
rich in drama (and melodrama). This is a play to remember."
The
Action Against Sol Schumann premiered in 2001 at Victory Gardens
Mainstage in Chicago. When it was presented later that year
off-off-Broadway at 14th Street Y in New York City, critics met it
with praise and admiration. The play was named a New York Times
"Critic's Choice" and won a playwriting prize from the
American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA).
Cast:
4 female, 5 male (doubling)
What
people say:
"Jeffrey
Sweet over the years has become really a masterful
playwright. Always brief, pithy, he has now developed a style of
concentrated dialogue in which there is not an extra syllable, and in
which the key emotional moments and ideas are punched out almost with
a ferocious energy. I really recommend The Action Against
Sol Schumann. It is intense, serious, highly theatrical,
entertaining." — WBEZ-Radio (NPR Chicago)
"…one
of those deliciously meaty stories with complex characters and a
substantial plot that surprises you at every corner. If The
Action Against Sol Schumann were a novel, you'd stay up
all night just to finish it." — New City
(Chicago)
"Victory
Gardens – the 2001 Regional Tony Award winner – champions
realistic Chicago voices such as Jeffrey Sweet,
whose The Action Against Sol Schumann last
season chilled and moved." — Chicago Magazine
About
the Playwright:
Jeffrey
Sweet is an American writer, journalist, theatre historian, and
teacher. He divides his time between New York and Chicago, where he
has been constant presence since the beginning of that city's
theatrical renaissance in the 1970s. His plays have been presented
off-Broadway, internationally, and in a variety of regional and
developmental theatres. A popular teacher and author of many
newspaper and magazine articles, he currently teaches at Wagner
College, and has taught or guest lectured at dozens of universities
and professional schools.
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