Not Most People: The Pornographist's Tale: (A Play in Nine Acts) - Softcover

Blanchard, Len

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1481771140 ISBN 13: 9781481771146

Publisher: AuthorHouse, 2013

Synopsis

The fundamental subject of Not Most People: The Pornographist's Tale is death as a philosophical problem of which all thinking men and women are conscious. Set in an unidentified state penitentiary, the play dramatizes love as that human possibility which enables us to live fulfilled, purposeful lives despite our mortality and our lack of knowledge of what, if anything, may await us after death. The playwright argues that, given our mortality, no form or expression of human love is obscene or immoral, that, in fact, when confronted by the greatest obscenity we experience, namely death, love is essential to our living happy and healthy lives. This is so precisely because death is both natural and inevitable. It is not a creation of man, and few if any would choose to die had they a choice. This theme is dramatized most vividly through the protagonist of the play, Thomas Wright. The pornographist of the title, Thomas is doing time for having had sexual relations with Kyle, a minor, and for sexually assaulting one of the models for the Web site he had been operating, a site dedicated to the bondage and torture of young men. Questions of morality are raised since Kyle, who celebrates his eighteenth birthday weeks after Thomas' incarceration, loves Thomas and the sexual assault charge is based on perjured testimony. In the course of the action and through the intercession of two strong women, attorney Gloria Pelham and Episcopal priest Susan Murray, most of the major characters experience the transformative power of love. These include Brad, a serial rapist and Thomas' neighbor in an adjacent cell; Vincent, a friend of and former model for Thomas and Vincent's girlfriend Katie; Kyle's mother Colleen Bernard, and Thomas himself. Kyle alone, in his unflinching love, is vindicated

About this title

About the Author:

Len Blanchard holds a B.A. degree in English from Washington and Lee University and a Ph.D. in English from Emory University where he was an NDEA Fellow. Employed for several years as a corporate and business writer in Dallas and Little Rock, he began writing seriously upon his relocation to Florida in 1990. Since 1999, he has taught as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Language and Literature at State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota. In 2001, Blanchard published through AuthorHouse An American Passion, an epic narrative poem on the life of Crazy Horse, the great war chief of the Oglala Lakota Sioux. He is also the author of hundreds of poems. A few of these poems celebrating the life of the beaches of the Florida coast were published in a collection entitled Provocations of the Birds and the Beach in 2005 by Bellowing Ark Press of Seattle. In 2012, Blanchard published through AuthorHouse a metaphysical drama entitled The First Day: Albert Camus meets Crazy Horse in the Kingdom and another collection of poems, People Matter: Sarasota Portraits and Others. His poems have appeared in numerous national magazines and journals, and he has been nominated on three occasions for a Pushcart Prize. A native of Connecticut, he is now at home in Bradenton, Florida.

About this edition

• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1481771140
• ISBN 13: 9781481771146
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392