The Book Club Play

The Book Club Play opens with a documentary crew installing a camera in a living room where five friends have met to discuss novels for years. Ana volunteered the group for the film because she believes their book club is exemplary. Within two meetings the camera has shown her otherwise.

The rules are strict and mostly hers: literary fiction only, no interruptions, a schedule agreed in advance. Then a member brings a guest who wants to talk about a bestseller, another admits to reading something with a cover the group would not approve of, and the discussions start drifting from the text to the marriages, jobs and resentments the text was supposed to keep at a distance. Ana's husband is in the group. So is a man who has been in love with her since university.

Karen Zacarias wrote the comedy, which came up through American regional theatres and has been widely produced since. Between scenes, unnamed characters address the camera directly with short testimonials about what they read and why, which widens the play beyond the one room.

The device also supplies the structure. The presence of the film crew is what makes everyone perform, and the performances are what come apart, so the play gets its comedy and its collapse from the same source.

It is finally about the gap between the person a reader wants to be seen as and what they actually take to bed at night, which is a small subject that turns out to hold a surprising amount of a life.