The novel begins on a high note with Margot, a Yale drama school graduate who dreams of Chekhov but finds herself, at 44, playing a monkey's defending attorney in a rainbow Harpo wig and an iridescent purple skirt that only add to her humiliation.
Twisting her narrative kaleidoscope, Prose rearranges the perspective as, chapter by chapter, she channels various members of the cast, audience, and more tangentially connected people — like the outspoken kindergartner who mortifyingly chooses an unfortunate moment of silence during a disastrous matinee performance to ask in a piping voice, "Grandpa, are you interested in this?" The boy's grandfather, heartbroken at his recent losses — of his wife and his job as an art museum curator — is keen on anything that brings him closer to his grandson. Privately, he thinks, "How could anyone not have been interested in that cast and their manic desperation?" It's a reaction clearly shared by Prose, who was stimulated to write this book after her granddaughter asked the same question at a similarly tattered children's production.
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