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Comedy
Joseph Fields and Peter de Vries, adapted from the novel by Mr.
de Vries
Characters: 2 male, 4 female
Interior Set
Tom Ewell played the Broadway part of a suburban husband in a 5
year childless marriage. He and his wife decide to adopt a baby,
but a loud mouth neighbor upsets the apple cart when the adoption
investigator comes to call. However, not to be outdone, Ewell finds
himself in the clutches of the investigator, who has suddenly
turned color. Later she announces that she is pregnant and is going
off to have the baby. She will see that the man and his wife
receive the child in due time through the agency. Shortly after the
baby arrives, however, the wife learns of the matter and starts
packing to go home to Mother. But it turns out that the adopted
baby was not fathered by the husband, and also that the wife is now
herself pregnant; and matters are mended.
"It offers laugh after laugh." N.Y. World Telegram &
Sun.
With a new Foreword by Derek De Vries It is 1963 in an unnamed town
in North Dakota, and Anthony Thrasher is languishing for a second
year in eighth grade. Prematurely sophisticated, young Anthony
spends too much time reading Joyce, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas but not
enough time studying the War of 1812 or obtuse triangles. A tutor
is hired, and this "modern Hester Prynne" offers Anthony lessons
that ultimately free him from eighth grade and situate her on the
cusp of the American sexual revolution. Anthony's restless
adolescent voice is perfectly suited to De Vries's blend of erudite
wit and silliness - not to mention his fascination with both
language and female anatomy - and it propels Slouching Towards
Kalamazoo through theological debates and quandaries both
dermatological and ethical to soar on the De Vriesian hallmark of
scrambling conventional wisdom for comic effect.
Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia -
the school of John Updike and Cheever - these three works from the
great American humorist Peter De Vries look with laughter upon its
lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort.
De Vries' classic situation comedy The Tunnel of Love follows the
interactions of a socially insecure, pun-loving family man, an
officious lady caseworker from an adoption agency, and a chauvinist
pig - all suburban neighbors who know far too much about one
another's private lives in this goofy and gently hilarious tale of
marital quibbles. A manic epic, Reuben, Reuben is really three
books in one, tied together by a 1950s suburban Connecticut setting
and hyper-literate cast of characters. A corruptible chicken farmer
fearful for the fate of his beloved town, a womanizing poet from
Wales (Dylan Thomas in disguise), and a hapless British
poet-cum-actor-and-agent all take turns as narrator, revealing
different, even conflicting views. But alcoholism, sexism,
small-mindedness, and calamity challenge the high spirits of De
Vries' well-read suburbanites. Without a Stitch in Time, a
selection of forty-six articles and stories written for the New
Yorker between 1943 and 1973, offers pun-filled autobiographical
vignettes that reveal the source of De Vries' nervous wit: the
cognitive dissonance between his Calvinist upbringing in 1920s
Chicago and the all-too-perfect postwar world.
Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia -
the school of John Updike and Cheever - these three works from the
great American humorist Peter De Vries look with laughter upon its
lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort.
De Vries' classic situation comedy The Tunnel of Love follows the
interactions of a socially insecure, pun-loving family man, an
officious lady caseworker from an adoption agency, and a chauvinist
pig - all suburban neighbors who know far too much about one
another's private lives in this goofy and gently hilarious tale of
marital quibbles. A manic epic, Reuben, Reuben is really three
books in one, tied together by a 1950s suburban Connecticut setting
and hyper-literate cast of characters. A corruptible chicken farmer
fearful for the fate of his beloved town, a womanizing poet from
Wales (Dylan Thomas in disguise), and a hapless British
poet-cum-actor-and-agent all take turns as narrator, revealing
different, even conflicting views. But alcoholism, sexism,
small-mindedness, and calamity challenge the high spirits of De
Vries' well-read suburbanites. Without a Stitch in Time, a
selection of forty-six articles and stories written for the New
Yorker between 1943 and 1973, offers pun-filled autobiographical
vignettes that reveal the source of De Vries' nervous wit: the
cognitive dissonance between his Calvinist upbringing in 1920s
Chicago and the all-too-perfect postwar world.
Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia -
the school of John Updike and Cheever - these three works from the
great American humorist Peter De Vries look with laughter upon its
lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort.
De Vries' classic situation comedy The Tunnel of Love follows the
interactions of a socially insecure, pun-loving family man, an
officious lady caseworker from an adoption agency, and a chauvinist
pig - all suburban neighbors who know far too much about one
another's private lives in this goofy and gently hilarious tale of
marital quibbles. A manic epic, Reuben, Reuben is really three
books in one, tied together by a 1950s suburban Connecticut setting
and hyper-literate cast of characters. A corruptible chicken farmer
fearful for the fate of his beloved town, a womanizing poet from
Wales (Dylan Thomas in disguise), and a hapless British
poet-cum-actor-and-agent all take turns as narrator, revealing
different, even conflicting views. But alcoholism, sexism,
small-mindedness, and calamity challenge the high spirits of De
Vries' well-read suburbanites. Without a Stitch in Time, a
selection of forty-six articles and stories written for the New
Yorker between 1943 and 1973, offers pun-filled autobiographical
vignettes that reveal the source of De Vries' nervous wit: the
cognitive dissonance between his Calvinist upbringing in 1920s
Chicago and the all-too-perfect postwar world.
With a new Foreword by Jeffrey Frank The most poignant of all De
Vries's novels, The Blood of the Lamb is also the most
autobiographical. It follows the life of Don Wanderhop from his
childhood in an immigrant Calvinist family living in Chicago in the
1950s through the loss of a brother, his faith, his wife, and
finally his daughter - a tragedy drawn directly from De Vries's own
life. Despite its foundation in misfortune, The Blood of the Lamb
offers glimpses of the comic sensibility for which De Vries was
famous. Engaging directly with the reader in a manner that
buttresses the personal intimacy of the story, De Vries writes with
a powerful blend of grief, love, wit, and fury.
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