Regina – Leslie Epstein, 1982 ★

Play It Again

An attitude in search of a story, any story, Regina is a frustrating case of an author too much in love with his main character. He uses her to tug at the possibility for hope amid a landscape of harsh desolation. Even if real hope doesn’t exist anywhere, he concludes, at least there is Regina.

Regina Glassman is a moderately famous Manhattan stage actress who has retreated to a life of magazine writing and raising two sons. That is until she is asked to join the cast of a major revival of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Regina made her name playing the ingenue Nora in an earlier production; she can’t say no to a chance to relive the role.

How young she was when she played teenaged Nora back then! How much more, she knows, can she bring to the part now.

Cop Shot – Mike McAlary, 1990 ★★★

A Helluva Drug

Every decade has its representative criminal activity: bootlegging in the 1920s; draft-dodging in the 1960s; dedicated disruption of service attacks in the 2020s. In the 1980s, crack cocaine was all the rage. Especially in the cities, its casualty rate had the quality of a pandemic.

Early one February morning in 1988, in the Jamaica section of Queens, crack claimed the life of rookie police officer Edward Byrne. He was in a marked squad car, guarding the home of a crack-crime witness when five bullets were fired directly at him. He was dead instantly.

As journalist Mike McAlary describes it in his account of the crime, Cop Shot, it was a murder that jolted a city, awoke a nation to the insidious nature of the crack trade, and triggered a rage-fueled hunger for justice. “This had only become the city’s biggest police investigation since Son of Sam,” he writes.

You Only Live Twice – Ian Fleming, 1964 ★★★½

Death in the Face

Death has a way of losing its celebrity and becoming a less obtrusive if ever-annoying companion as one ages. It seeps into everything, closing off future hopes and replacing them with grim resignation.

Ian Fleming was nearing the end of his life when he wrote You Only Live Twice; you feel that from the way it reads. There is a sense of wan completion in Bond’s journey this time around. Frantic pace and knife’s-edge tension is replaced by philosophic contemplation.

And yet despite a sepulchral tone, this manages to be quite a gripping spy thriller most of the way through. For over half of it, Bond is immersed in an unusually realistic and low-key diplomatic mission involving a crash course in Japanese culture. Just as you settle into that, you are plunged into an utterly phantasmagoric personal mission involving one of the most bizarre yet familiar villains of the 007 canon.

The Seagull – Anton Chekhov, 1896 [Translation by Ann Dunnigan] ★★★

Stop Being So Dramatic

Forming a judgment on any work regarded as a classic by so many can be tricky. Enjoy it, and expose your conformity. Don’t, and acknowledge the possibility you are the problem.

I get the latter feeling whenever I read Chekhov, one of world literature’s most revered names. His drowsy narratives and lifeless characters leave me so cold. Yet the critical elite extol his plays as spellbinding works of deep emotion and unique stagecraft.

This has confused and annoyed me for quite a while. Yet re-reading his first multi-act and most famous play, The Seagull, something clicked. Not so much that I enjoyed it (I don’t think Chekhov wrote for that purpose), but at least I began to suss out why he matters to so many.