Etiquette and Vitriol: The Food Chain and Other Plays

By Nicky Silver

Book Overview

"A deeply gifted playwright." --Ben Brantley, New York Times

The first collection by a master of razor-sharp wit and black humor, Etiquette and Vitriol brings together two of Silver's highly acclaimed and successful works--the long-running Off-Broadway hit The Food Chain and the award-winning Pterodactyls--with two earlier works--Fat Men in Skirts and Free Will & Wanton Lust--which helped establish Silver as one of the leading comic voices of his generation.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1559361239
• ISBN13: 9781559361231
• Release Date: December 1996
• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 0.99 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful Insight

This collection of plays has the ability to satisfy both the comic and tragic needs of any dramatic reader. Silver's ability to write dark comedy is perhaps unparalleled by any living playwright. He has the skill to smoothly draw the reader into an entertaining story, and then to slowly put the reader off-guard until you find yourself wrapped up in the middle of a very dark narrative.Silver uses many different theatrical approaches in the collection. Most of his plays are a mix of dialogue and monolgue, and he often takes modernist perspectives of staging. In any given play he will engage two opposing dramatic styles -- such as Noel Coward v. Berthold Brecht in Free Will and Wanton Lust -- to accentuate his message. The playwright's language flows easily and the dialogue is smooth. While some characters at times appear to have a forced three-dimensionality, the reader feels that Silver is doing this on purpose.The greatest benefit of Silver's gift is that, through comedy and the guise of comedy, he is able to present otherwise difficult subjects to us, such as deeper meanings of love and hate, loneliness, self-denial, and spiritual needs. Recommended for all theatre fans.

He's more like GOLD than SILVER

When I was a theatre student I rarely found plays that excited me to actually want to read, direct, or act in. I was on a crusade one year buying script after script after script. Usually I would be bored and put them down after the first scene. When I picked up Etiquette and Vitriol I think I almost died. Here was a gay playwright who didn't write your normal "I'm ok and I'm gay" play. He writes about the deconstruction of families and relationships. He has an amazing ability to give you something so horribly disgusting and then to make you laugh at it. Like in FAT MEN IN SKIRTS which is a dark comedy about a mother and son who are trapped on a desert island and their struggles to survive and their inability to acclimate back to civilized culture. At the end of the first act the mother is raped by the son and in the back ground you here Bali Hai from SOUTH PACIFIC, if you get the reference of the song there is almost no way you can stop from laughing but then you realize what you are laughing at. That is the brilliance of his writing. I highly recommend all of his works!

Up and Coming Jewish Playwright Deserves to be Read

Nicky Silver's work will in time be noticed by the masses. For now, his plays will intrigue and entertain the relatively small number of people that pays allegiance to them. Etiquette and Vitriol is a well-shaped, fully engaging product. And it's funny. Extremely. It's hillarious really. And textured and smart. The work brings in characters of all sizes, and plants them together upon the stage, focusing on relationships -- familial, social, sexual... Each of the plays is hardly cluttered however. We are given a few figures to work with and thus these figures must be and are quite complex. They carry with them a certain authenticity often unrealized by many a playwright. Silver's work is impressive and sure to make jealous any aspiring artist. Buy the book. You'll love it.

A Good Nicky Silver Primer

This anthology is a good introduction to Nicky Silver. It provides the reader with a well-rounded overview of Silver's work, and I enjoyed reading the author's own comments on the plays in the introduction.

TRULY VISIONARY...

if you buy no other anthology this year...you must own this one. nicky silver remains one of the american theatre's funniest, smartest, most exciting writers. if you like your comedy served up with the occassional gut-punch, you can't go wrong. exciting, viscerally engaging, challenging...i can't say enough. this is a collection of plays bound to endure.