The Dazzle and Everett Beekin

by Richard Greenberg

Two “haunting and luminous” (Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times ) plays from the author of Take Me Out and Three Days of Rain

In The Dazzle , Richard Greenberg takes on the story of the Collyer brothers, legendary New York eccentrics who, following their deaths in 1947, were found to have collected more than 136 tons of trash within their grand but crumbling Harlem manse. As depicted by Richard Greenberg, Langley and Homer Collyer are consumed by their obsessions—Homer reveling in telling tall tales, Langley captured by the “dazzle” of images contained within objects—in this “beautiful, disturbing, shockingly funny and profoundly humane play by a masterful dramatist” (Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times ).

Everett Beekin explores the tensions between the safety of family and the yearning for a larger life through the relationships of two sets of Jewish sisters. Set in the 1940s, Act One opens with Anna and Sophie dining in their mother’s Lower East Side tenement, bickering over the presence of their sister Miri’s Gentile suitor, Jimmy. In Act Two, fifty years later, Anna’s daughters Nell and Celia meet on a California beach before the wedding of Nell’s daughter Laurel. Linking the generations is the name Everett Beekin—Jimmy’s business partner and, later, Laurel’s prospective bridegroom Everett Beekin VIII. As the play unfolds, Everett Beekin becomes “a haunted, restless meditation on American rootlessness” (Ben Brantley, The New York Times ).

Genres: Plays

208 pages, Paperback

First published April 16, 2003

About the author

Richard Greenberg was an American playwright and television writer known for his subversively humorous depictions of middle-class American life. He had more than 25 plays premiere on Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway in New York City and eight at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California, including The Violet Hour, Everett Beekin, and Hurrah at Last. Greenberg is perhaps best known for his 2002 play Take Me Out.

Reviews

[H. Givens · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only read "The Dazzle." It opens with an author's note that says he knows almost nothing about the Collyers. I hoped that was just in reference to only a little being knowable about them, we have so few sources to go on, but no. He apparently knows almost nothing, even of the little bit that we have available to know. So my question is... why write a play about them? If you just wanted to write a vaguely surreal play about two brothers, fine, but why did you claim it was about two real historical men? Why use their names and then not read anything about them at all? What is the point?? They were two real people who had mystifying lives and tragic deaths, and you just chose not to know any of that or write anything respectful of them, just slap their names on something else.

[Alana · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Dazzle disappointed me, mostly because Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain and his The Violet Hour are two of my very favorite plays. That being said, I had very high expectations after my knowledge of Three Days of Rain and The Violet Hour.