Ireland – Jason Hensel

The Rewind Button is a group blogging project that I’m participating in. We’re taking on Rolling Stone‘s Top 40 albums of all time and writing our own reviews of them.

Much like their two-syllable name, there are two sides to U2. On one side is the bombastic rock stars who crave the applause from hundreds of thousands of people on their feet in an arena. On the other side is an Irish band happy to sing songs of the people and be rewarded with nothing more than free drinks for the night.

It’s with The Joshua Tree that U2 finally managed to integrate these two sides into a fully formed artistic achievement. The album on a whole is very representative of their goal to capture the spirit of America, primarily its open lands. On the album’s first side (and I encourage you to listen to it on vinyl), U2 belts the listener with brashness and bravado. But it’s the album’s second side that interests me the most, because it sounds more tame, more introspective. When one goes to the desert, thoughts of chest puffing don’t come to mind. The thoughts are more inward, philosophical and based in survival.

I haven’t listened to this album in years before reviewing it for this project. I’m happy to say that I still feel the same way I did in 1987, that the album’s second side has more cohesion and captures the album’s goal better than the first side. That said, I will never turn off “With or Without You” when it plays on the radio, and I will always recite alongside Bono when he says “One hundred, two hundred…” from “Bullet the Blue Sky.” But give me “Red Hill Mining Town” over “Where the Streets Have No Name” any day.

I’m looking forward to the end of this project when I can rearrange the top 40 list to my liking. The Joshua Tree will definitively be in the top 15, maybe even the top 10.

Please visit these other blogs participating in The Rewind Button project:

Betty Livin

Love As A Verb

Life Doesn’t Have to Suck

Renée Sylvestre-Williams

Sara Bynoe

Musicqwest
Be a River With Me

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Ah, the family drama. What’s more fun than to learn about others, and what’s more disappointing than finding out that they’re just like you? I guess that’s the beauty of universal truths. Not handled well, though, these truths can drive you mad with boredom.

This is the case with The Night Season, by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, a play meandering for truth and completion. And what it does find is no different that what is found in hundreds of other stories. Some will welcome the familiarity. For others, knowing how it concludes before arriving at the end is an exercise in patience and concentration.

In the play, we witness a family drama set in Sligo, Ireland, which was once home for poet W.B. Yeats. Lenkiewicz–inspired by Yeats’ work–doesn’t handle language or image quite as well as her muse. However, like Yeats, she’s earnest with her ideas.

The family consists of three sisters (Judith, Rose, and Maud), a single father (Patrick), and a grandmother (Lily). The mother is never seen and living off in London, having left the family 15 years ago. This is the family’s underlying angst. Their need for love manifests itself in several ways. Rose sleeping with a visiting actor (playing Yeats…yes, Yeats, in a movie), Judith’s on again off again affair with Gary, and Maud’s care for her absent husband are the three most blatant examples. Patrick’s interest in a bartender with big breasts and Lily’s childlike adoration for the actor add levity to a play carrying a lot of woe-is-me weight.

Though filled with stock characters (e.g., the flighty grandmother, the drunken dad) and clichéd scenes (I won’t give away the ending), the writing’s structure is interesting enough to keep you reading. In fact, it feels like a screenplay, with quick, short scenes and various locations throughout its pages.

That’s actually what this play needs, to be made into a movie. If so, it will do well on Lifetime, where its tale of unrequited love would fit right in with that network’s programming.

With The Night Season, we have a so-so play by a promising writer whose ideas are still finding a foundation. Let’s just hope in the future, it’s one we haven’t seen before.

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Jason Hensel

The Rewind Button: The Joshua Tree

Review: The Night Season