“In Richard Brautigan’s classic surrealist novel, Trout Fishing In America, the narrator visits a store selling trout streams by the foot. They are stacked in piles like pieces of lumber, each length corresponding to a different price.
In Jez Butterworth’s 2012 play The River, produced by Quantum Theatre, it’s as if they picked out a20-foot piece of stream from this store and slapped it onto the stage. This construct is ignored at first — the actors literally hopping over it — and the audience is forced to wonder whether it’s one of many surreal conceits. But then it is not ignored…”
by Stuart Sheppard, Pittsburgh Quarterly
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