Poetry Criticism | Silverstein, Shel - Variety (essay date 22 June 1983)

Variety (essay date 22 June 1983)

SOURCE: “Three New Plays.” Variety 311 (22 June 1983): 93, 96.

[In the following review of Silverstein's one-act play “Gorilla,” the reviewer praises the work as a “savagely wry tragicomedy.”]

Every playwright seems to have an eccentric one-acter that expresses his real personality and reveals his mind and heart. Among the three works here, “The Disappearance of the Jews,” by David Mamet; “Hot Line,” by Elaine May, and “Gorilla,” by Shel Silverstein, it is the latter, an author of books, songs and cartoons for children, who has the most finished of the playlets.

Silverstein's “Gorilla,” a savagely wry tragicomedy, concerns a young man who dons a gorrilla suit and sneaks into the animal's cage to live for a while to sort out his life. The beauty of the play is in the logic of the youth who achieves a sort of spiritual freedom by choosing to be a capitive, while the...

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