Word: whitelies
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...illuminated white line bisects the endless black of the Boston University Theatre’s Stewart F. Lane and Bonnie Comley Studio 210. Simple and stark, this white line is the lone scenic element in the Boston Center for American Performance’s minimalist production of Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive”—yet, any further set would have been needless in this superbly acted, provocative memory play, which runs through...
...times, the line functions as the road on which narrator Li’l Bit (Alicia Hunt) takes driving lessons from her Uncle Peck (Mark Cohen) in 1960s rural Maryland. However, when the relationship between the two quickly turns sexual, the white line suggests more of a boundary—one that should not be traversed. It is reminiscent of one of Li’l Bit’s early encounters with Peck at the age of thirteen, when she tells him, “You’ve got to let me–draw the line...
Hiding in the greenhouse of a lavish apartment on the Upper West Side of New York, the protagonist of “Eight White Nights” sees his life flash before his eyes as he tastes a spicy hors d’oeuvre. This moment appears to be directly inspired by Proust’s episode of the madeleine—in fact, André Aciman’s entire second novel reads like an exercise in bringing a feverish Proustian narrative to twenty-first century Manhattan. This novel, which blurs the boundaries between supermarket romance and literary fiction...
...plot is unabashedly gimmicky, clashing with Aciman’s rhythmic and ornamented sentences. “Eight White Nights” opens with a (heavily repeated) hook—“I am Clara”—with which the main love interest introduces herself. It then breaks into an eight-part narrative, in which each part chronicles a different night that the unnamed narrator spends with Clara. He meets her while lurking behind the tree at a Christmas party and is instantly and fatally drawn towards her. Smart and mean, Clara scintillates with brilliance...
...bulk of the narrative follows the protagonist and his longings, desires, and solipsistic rants as he yearns after Clara and analyses her every gesture. Though laden with the narrator’s passionate obsession for Clara, “Eight White Nights” chronicles an essentially chaste love. Aciman denies the reader the full range of the sensuous prose that he unquestionably mastered in his first novel, “Call Me By Your Name,” and consequently creates a more emotionally tentative work...