The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts [Paperback]

It is fitting that Ecco Press, which reissued McCarthy's novels when most of the world was neglecting them, should publish a play that is still in search of a theater. But this story of deep trouble amidst four generations of a black family in Louisville, Kentucky, places McCarthy-arguably America's best living novelist-in the long tradition of novelists who have tried the dramatic form and failed to meet its elusive demands. There are some wonderful scenes, and obvious problems of stagecraft-such as cue lines for a god and impractical sets, including a real stone wall-are nothing a good director can't surmount. But a deeper flaw is that its conflicts are both overly transparent and insufficiently bodied forth in dramatic action. The main character, Ben, is wrong when he tells us that stonemasonry is man's first gift and oldest craft. Those in theater know there is an older one whose secrets are just as long, as hard, and as necessary to master. Recommended for comprehensive literature collections.
Peter Josyph, New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

National Book Award-winning novelist McCarthy does something daring for these days. He, white, proffers a play about a black family, a drama devoid of defensive race-consciousness in either himself or his characters. The Telfairs are an old Louisville family who, in the early 1970s, include four generations under one roof. Ben, 32, is the play's central character and, like Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, its explicator (two Bens appear onstage, one engaged in the action, the other at a podium). Ben earlier quit graduate school to follow his grandfather's trade, stonemasonry, which the old man, now 101, still plies. During the play, which proceeds through several deaths, the disappearance of Ben's rebellious teenage nephew, and the disclosure of Ben's father's infidelity as well as a birth and Ben's sister's remarriage, Ben struggles to be the strong center of the family and, Ben-the-narrator makes explicit, to understand the spiritual meanings of his grandfather's life and attachment to his trade. Although it might be more comfortably realized onscreen than onstage, this thoughtful drama is one fine response to the cry for art to be concerned with family values. (See also the May 15 Upfront review of The Crossing, McCarthy's sequel to his All the Pretty Horses. Ray Olson --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.