Playing Hannah

PLAYING HANNAH is the story of two young stage actresses and a wayward writer they fall in with, and takes them on a journey from bucolic New England to the misty Louisiana bayous, from the sands of the Syrian Desert to Monterey Bay, and from the highs of applause into the lows of lonely darkness. …Hannah’s theater was a magnifying glass, a microscope, a telescope and her standard, through which she inspected and dissected and rejected, and against which she gauged all that she was learning of her world. Katie’s theater was a mirror-handheld, full-length and ceiling-mounted-used for the inspection of herself. The stage was their passion. In this novel strong with female leads, Hannah and Katie meet a cast of dynamic characters in their travels-an entertaining blend of tragic and comic masks who appeal to the actor in us all, coaxing the reader onto the boards and under the proscenium arches, where night after night the shows are different, and where every performer works without a net. The more Hannah’s on stage, however, the further she is drawn into a fictional world where she’s discovered she can evade the playing of herself by hiding in a resume of other characters. Then Lincoln Dollar writes the play Hannah uses to drive into a successful tour, but when her make-believe world finally collapses she is forced to construct another which is real. PLAYING HANNAH is funny, clever, verve-y - so attractive. Marc Estrin, Fomite Press.