Foolscap: Or, The Stages of Love - Softcover

Malone, Michael

3.81

503 ratings by Goodreads

9781402239359: Foolscap: Or, The Stages of Love

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1402239351 ISBN 13: 9781402239359

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark, 2010

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Professor Theo Ryan lives a quiet life teaching drama at Cavendish University in North Carolina, but everything gets turned upside down when he meets Ford Rexford―America's best-known playwright. Ford is the most talented and the most impossible man Theo has ever met. And Ford's genius, his reckless romanticism, and his fearless love of life profoundly influence the reticent scholar.

When Ford discovers that Theo has written a play, a madcap journey begins that pushes the young recluse out of the wings onto the bright, bustling stages of life and love. There he finds himself playing roles he never would have thought possible. In his most hilarious book since Handling Sin, Michael Malone has created a story as wildly funny as it is profoundly wise.

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About the Author:

Michael Malone is the author of ten novels, a collection of short stories, and two works of nonfiction. Educated at Carolina and at Harvard, he is now a professor in Theater Studies at Duke University. Among his prizes are the Edgar, the O. Henry, the Writers Guild Award, and the Emmy. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A high-spirited romp through the lower depths of academe, as repressed theatrical scion/drama prof Theodore Ryan-- taking inspiration from his sozzled friend Joshua ``Ford'' Rexford, the distinguished playwright whose biography Theo is writing--seizes the day and finds a daring, joyous, illegal way to get his own play on the boards. Theo's play, Foolscap, a historical fantasy about Sir Walter Raleigh's attempt to write a play about himself just before his execution, has been ignored by the few people who've seen it as dated and unplayable, leaving Theo becalmed at North Carolina's Cavendish University, home to senile President General Irwin Kaney, football- coach-turned-Provost Buddy Tupper, Jr., and so on down the line (a long, manic line, in a procession worthy of David Lodge) to the latest high-profile hires, conference perennial Jane Nash-Gantz and fat-cat Marxist Herbert Crawford. Theo's scheme to keep his old nemesis Scottie Smith from taking over as artistic director of Cavendish's theater emboldens him first to audition for the spring production of Guys and Dolls and then to show Ford his dusty manuscript--but Ford, hours after pronouncing the play great, elopes to England with a graduate student, and Theo hatches a plan to pass Foolscap off as Raleigh's work by arranging to have a forged manuscript ``discovered'' with the unwitting help of retired Renaissance scholar Dame Winifred Throckmorton. At story's end, Theo will have completed two wildly successful plays, neither of which he can claim as his own--but he'll also have found (finally) not only true love but a sense of reconciliation with Ford's ghost (which puts in some comically literal appearances), his own trouper parents, and his vocation. Even looser-limbed than Handling Sin (1986)--the logic of Theo's mad dash to freedom won't always stand scrutiny--but thickly planted with hilarious grotesques and gorgeous comic episodes that make scrutiny your least likely reaction. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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