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The Action Against Sol Schumann

The Action Against Sol Schumann
Your Price: $18.95 CDN
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)

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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