American Utopia contains little of the play's language in fact, it contains little language, full stop. Dialogue accompanied only by stage directions always strikes me as tragically bony, bereft of both the energy that renders live theater compelling and of the detail that lifts other prose from the page. In the spirit of honest criticism, I should note that I have a bias here: I hate reading plays. Not having seen the musical, I can only guess - but I can testify, with great pleasure, that the book stands on its own as a soothing and uplifting, if somewhat nebulous, experience of art, as well as an argument for the reincarnation of hope in the American project. It can only have been a stroke of luck that, together, Kalman and Byrne hit on a form perfect for our attention-frayed, stay-at-home age: a version of a play that, rather than offering the full script with no visuals, offers the staged American Utopia's spirit or, at least, what I imagine its spirit must have been. American Utopia, David Byrne amd Maira Kalman
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