Missing the Theater? Trade Playbills for These Novels

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/theater/theater-novels-coronavirus.html

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Theater, at its simplest, requires an actor and an audience. And in this strange moment, that’s a very tall order. Scripts are available, of course, and filmed performance, too. But if you are missing not only plays themselves, but the ephemera that surrounds them — the cramped seats and the rustling wrappers, the marquee lights and the scrum at the stage door — you might lose yourself in a novel of the theater, instead.

In this period of suspension, novels set in the theater are portals into a realm that in real life has temporarily gone dark. Immersive by nature, staged inside our minds, they can sit us down in a buzzing audience or slip us into a darkened wing, sneak us inside a tense rehearsal room or pop us onto a bar stool at an after-party.

In our heads, inside these books, we’re free to do what right now is forbidden — to arrive in Edinburgh, say, and roam the streets in a festival throng where social distancing is not required, or to gather with friends and put on a play of our own.

There’s poignancy in that, but it’s soothing, too, a calming act of imagination. And it’s a distraction that can be stretched long past a play’s typical running time, with as many intermissions as you like.

We’ve made a chronological list of some of our favorites. The concession stand is all you.

This 1814 novel has never enjoyed the obsessive fandom other Austen books attract. Blame its inhibited heroine, Fanny Price. But I love “Mansfield Park,” because it makes theater dangerous. In the book’s first half, the estate’s young people decide to stage a private production of August von Kotzebue’s “Lover’s Vows,” a racy romantic drama about illegitimacy and sexual desire. (Because Fanny is no fun, Fanny disapproves.) In fleet scenes, Austen captures the excitement of rehearsal, the frisson of “showmance” and the paradox of theater as both liberating and distorting. ALEXIS SOLOSKI

Elegant and bitchy, this acid Maugham comedy, published in 1937, describes a London diva threatened by a young rival who covets both her young lover and her career. Some will know this story from Istvan Szabo’s 2004 movie, “Being Julia,” starring a splendid Annette Bening, but the novel has its own considerable charms, particularly a late scene in which Julia outclasses her adversary by means of the perfect dress. And then celebrates by eating carbs. Julia’s son complains that his parents have warped him by raising him in a world of make-believe. But make-believe, Julia argues, “is the only reality.” SOLOSKI

In 1938, a 14-year-old Pamela Brown began writing this book, the first of the Blue Door series. Three years later, as a wartime evacuee, she published it and used the proceeds to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. One of the loveliest children’s books about young actors (alongside Noel Streatfeild’s Gemma series), it follows a group of seven children in the English town of Fenchester who discover an abandoned theater. After fixing up the place, they begin to invent and rehearse their own theatricals, discovering various talents — writing, costuming, stage design. The adventures are gentle and the children’s personalities — sometimes generous, sometimes bratty — appealingly real. SOLOSKI

The acting job pays a paltry 16 pounds a week, but Sam Beresford accepts it eagerly, heading north from London to spend the 1959 season in a seaside repertory company, where ambition, duplicity and jealousy are far more plentiful than juicy roles. Blakemore, the director who won Tony Awards for “Copenhagen” and “Kiss Me, Kate,” writes with marvelous insight and delicious ease, chronicling the soaring joys and petty miseries of a little-known actor’s life. But this isn’t an insiders-only book — and the roman à clef gossip it sparked when it came out in 1968 still adds to our pleasure in it. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES

Like her equally wondrous “Nights at the Circus,” Carter’s 1991 magical realist comedy is both a cracking picaresque and a meditation on what it means when art and life commingle. Narrated by Dora Chance, a twin who has lived 75 years as a trifling theater and film star, it details the adventures of the Chance and Hazard families, clans given to twins, theatricality and convoluted paternity claims. The plot, which tips its hat to Shakespeare’s comedies, is largely impenetrable, but Carter delivers its zany twists and turns with sweet-bitter affection. Dora’s fervent motto: “What a joy it is to dance and sing.” SOLOSKI

A shrewd and sexy work of historical fiction, Waters’s debut novel excavates a forgotten mode of music hall performance, embedded within a queer love story. In Victorian England, Nan, a teenage oyster slinger, falls for the glamorous Kitty, a “masher” who performs popular songs dressed as man. Nan follows Kitty, first to London and then onto the stage. Through disguise and performance and adventures in the sex trade, Nan comes to understand who she is and what she wants. The characterizations are rich and the evocation of the limelit music halls dazzling. SOLOSKI

This mindbender, originally published in France in 2005, has nothing to do with the theater proper, but its action is consumed with a bizarre theatrical immersion; when I first read it, I couldn’t wait to urge it on a bookish actor friend. In the aftermath of an accident, the central character receives a hefty settlement — then uses it to surround himself with people hired to re-enact real-world events for him. The novel was McCarthy’s debut, and it shares some DNA with Charlie Kaufman’s grimly obsessive 2008 movie, “Synecdoche, New York,” as well as with every drama student who has ever insisted that life itself is a performance. COLLINS-HUGHES

Lined up outside, waiting to get into a fringe festival performance in Edinburgh, the spectators aren’t sure at first whether the clash they witness between two passing drivers is entertainment or genuine combat. But characters often question their own sense of reality in this fast-paced 2006 detective novel, which uses the festival-frenzied city as the backdrop to its many-layered intrigue. For Atkinson’s restlessly retired investigator, Jackson Brodie, the dangerous case proves more consistent company than his actress girlfriend, who surely is cheating on him even as he finances the obscure existentialist play that brought them both to town. COLLINS-HUGHES

Though most of my favorite theater novels provide an abundance of comfort, the literary equivalent of family-size concessions candy, Alarcón’s 2013 book, set in a nameless South American country, offers a less reassuring read. Its entwined stories, narrated by a journalist, follow Nelson, a young actor cast in “The Idiot President,” a guerrilla theater company’s touring show, and Henry, the company’s leader and a former political prisoner. If the form sometimes falters, the novel searchingly explores how life demands its own performance and its own peculiar participation. SOLOSKI

Felix Phillips, an esteemed artistic director abruptly exiled from his Canadian theater company in a cunning coup, is the stand-in for the magical Prospero in Atwood’s delightfully inspired, wonderfully wrought 2016 retelling of “The Tempest,” part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series of adaptations by contemporary novelists. As Felix broods in wounded solitude, the ghost of his dead daughter, Miranda, keeps him company. Only when he is coaxed into teaching drama at a correctional center does he get a chance at retribution — by way of an interactive “Tempest” and a cast of inmates who feel deep sympathy for Caliban and his witchy mother, too. COLLINS-HUGHES

The drawback to literary laurels, like the National Book Award that this stunner rightly won last fall, is that they can make honorees seem less like must-reads than should-reads. But Choi’s shrewd, funny, wholly absorbing #MeToo theater takedown — set in the 1980s in an arts high school’s drama program, and later among its alumni as damaged adults — is the farthest thing from an intellectual chore. A gasp-making achievement of construction, observation and emotional synthesis, it takes exquisite aim at what Choi calls “the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts,” and at a toxic system of training and practice that worships gurus as gods. COLLINS-HUGHES

Adventurous provocation that bruises actors’ bodies and minds is the theatrical brand at Indifferent Honest, a scruffy-chic Chicago storefront theater whose sadistic artistic director, Malcolm, is its much deferred-to perennial star. He’s the kind of charismatic drama-world tough guy who wants real violence, not fight choreography, on his non-Equity stage. A tightly plotted, enjoyably pulpy psychological thriller from 2019, this is a portrait of an artist as a malevolent force. Told by dueling female narrators, it is also as much a fantasy of violent revenge as the new play that Malcolm is readying, perhaps unwisely, for production. COLLINS-HUGHES