In a year when the perennial favorite, Our Town, slipped from inclusion on the list of the top ten high school plays and musicals performed since its inception in 1938, to the rescue comes Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake—a rallying cry for the play’s importance to the high school experience, to everyone’s experience, and to the importance of playing Emily. Crafted as the story of a play (and a character) within a story, Patchett’s narrator, Lara, reflects on her time playing Emily in a Michigan summer stock theater company called Tom Lake. For her three grown daughters, the story of Lara’s early life playing Emily is a riveting diversion and window into their parents’ lives prior to their birth, filling the tedious hours of cherry picking on their farm near Traverse City, Michigan, during the COVID pandemic. For Wilder devotees, the novel’s meanderings through Our Town and the...
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Book Review|
October 31 2023
Tom Lake
Tom Lake
. By Ann Patchett. New York
: HarperCollins
, 2023
, 312 pp.
Terryl W. Hallquist
Terryl W. Hallquist
TERRYL W. HALLQUIST is the performance review editor of the Thornton Wilder Journal. Professor of Theatre Emerita, she previously taught acting, directing, and Shakespeare in the Theatre Department at Vanderbilt University and directed many plays including Our Town, Chekhov’s Three Sisters and The Sea Gull, and Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind. She lives in Franklin, Tennessee, with her husband and her dog, Hazel.
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Thornton Wilder Journal (2023) 4 (2): 253–258.
Citation
Terryl W. Hallquist; Tom Lake. Thornton Wilder Journal 31 October 2023; 4 (2): 253–258. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/thorntonwilderj.4.2.0253
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