![]() ![]() Poole presents his findings methodically through well-documented facts and similar studies. Separated by significant eras in American history, a reader gets a clear picture of how the definition of a monster changes depending on the cultural and political events of an era. Thoughts: What makes a monster a monster? More importantly, what is the definition of a monster? In Monsters in America, Scott Poole asks these thought-provoking questions while traveling through American history following the evolution of the monster over time. Consulting newspaper accounts, archival materials, personal papers, comic books, films, and oral histories, Poole adroitly illustrates how the creation of the monstrous ‘other’ not only reflects society’s fears but shapes actual historical behavior and becomes a cultural reminder of inhuman acts.” From Victorian-era mad scientists to modern-day serial killers, new monsters appear as American society evolves, paralleling fluctuating challenges to the cultural status quo. Conflicting anxieties about race, class, gender, sexuality, religious beliefs, science, and politics manifest as haunting beings among the populace. ![]() “Monsters are not just fears of the individual psyche, historian Scott Poole explains, but are concoctions of the public imagination, reactions to cultural influences, social change, and historical events. MONSTER IN A BOX made its world debut at the Mitzi E.Title: Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting The whole profoundly disturbing, deceptively sprawling evening has been leading up to that last, quiet farewell-and when it comes, it's a moment of magic. Coincidentally, he has finished the wrenching experience of writing his autobiographical novel and, in telling about his bittersweet engagement in Thornton Wilder's play, he closes with a surreal incident from the production that leads to a very theatrical moment of emotional release. Finally, at the end of the incredible roller-coaster ride he has charted, Gray reaches the point that sends him and us home with a semblance of calm and understanding. By the time he has journeyed to Nicaragua with his ever-present girlfriend Renee to hear a congregation of grieving mothers tell of the atrocities the contras have committed, he is on a wild-eyed roll and when he arrives at a screening of "Moonstruck" at MoMA, obsessed with the idea that he is a victim of AIDS, he has reached a paroxysm of hysteria that is hilarious and horrifying. From there, Gray gradually picks up the pace, proceeding from his unsuccessful stab at working on the novel at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire to his equally fruitless attempts to keep writing while he is preparing a theater piece from the Mark Taper Forum. The "box" is a cardboard box, and within it is the "monster", a huge loose-leaf binder containing the pages of his novel. He begins with his ritualistic sipping of a glass of water, then slowly starts the action by explaining the title. The setting, as usual, was a table and a chair, and the author-performer appeared in his customary dark slacks and plain sports shirt. The evening, which lasted a little under 2 hours without intermission, was totally true to Gray tradition. It's a story within a story, as Gray explains it, "about a man who can't write a book about a man who can't take a vacation." And as Gray unwinds the trail of weird, sometimes demented episodes that marks the efforts to finish his manuscript, he links these tales to the internal battle he faces in trying to come to terms with his past. It's often very, very funny, as when he tells of being thrown out of the Hermitage Museum, but because the novel deals with Gray's Oedipal feelings toward his mother, it is also a dark and brooding work about the author's struggle to find inner peace. MONSTER, for example, is about the distractions Gray encountered while he was trying to write his upcoming novel, Impossible Vacation. The geography of Gray's stories always begins and ends within his psyche, and his stories, however delightful, are filled with strange, fearful terrors he has found therein. But like all of Gray's work, this one-man adventure story stakes out its most fascinating territory in the mind and spirit of its storyteller. MONSTER IN A BOX, the 13th of Spalding Gray's unique stage monologues, takes place in locations that skip from Nicaragua to New York and involves characters that range from a gathering of UFO enthusiasts in L.A. ![]()
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