Street: A Play
by Joan Aiken
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Description
A two act farce about a pair of young lovers who live in an English village on opposite sides of a heavily trafficked superhighway.Tags
Member Reviews
Interest/Reading Level: Grades 7 – Adult
Synopsis:
Street is a two act play about a strange reality of a heavily trafficked freeway in England and the two young lovers who live on opposite sides of the street. Main characters are Meg Mirkin, the village witch, her sons, Hannibal and Toomey, Fred Steele, proprietor of the Spotted Pig restaurant, his daughters Lily (who loves Toomey) and Hannah (who loves and is married to Hannibal…although this is revealed late in the play). There are truck drivers who blaze through town with great speed, sometimes “accidentally” hitting a house, destroying it. Random villagers lend their voices to the atrocities of trying to live in the town. 17 years before the opening of the play, Hannibal show more stole the key to the bridge. The key allowed a gate to span the freeway allowing trucks and cars through as Hannibal’s father allowed. Since Hannibal stole the key, there is no way to guard the access of trucks through the town. As such, trucks speed by every 30-45 seconds making it impossible to cross. In spite of this, Toomey and Lily develop their own “sign” language and fall in love. They hatch a plan to runaway. Meg sees to it that when Hannibal returns, he does not ruin his brother’s life by stealing Lily. When Meg’s magic ring is returned to the Forest, life resumes to the idyllic time of days gone by.
Reflection:
This is a great play for middle or high school students to read and perform. Ms Aiken’s play is wonderfully written. She gives direction as to what needs to be staged for the play from a simple implementation to a full scale production. The book includes beautiful illustrations by Arvis Stewart that resemble wood cuts or at the very least, striking pen and ink drawings. The music interspersed in the play was written by John Sebastian Brown who is Ms. Aiken’s son. Ten songs (music and lyrics) appear at the end of the book. Surprisingly, this play (book) has been in the Library for over 30 years and has never been checked out. The book is a first edition which does not happen often in school libraries. I recently gave it a teacher to read and see if it would be of interest to students. He is working on developing a production of the play for next year. I enjoyed the simplicity of the play and the sweet love story complete with a villain. To produce this play would not be expensive. It would be a nice event for a school to produce and even use the occasion to raise funds for the arts programs that are suffering. show less
Synopsis:
Street is a two act play about a strange reality of a heavily trafficked freeway in England and the two young lovers who live on opposite sides of the street. Main characters are Meg Mirkin, the village witch, her sons, Hannibal and Toomey, Fred Steele, proprietor of the Spotted Pig restaurant, his daughters Lily (who loves Toomey) and Hannah (who loves and is married to Hannibal…although this is revealed late in the play). There are truck drivers who blaze through town with great speed, sometimes “accidentally” hitting a house, destroying it. Random villagers lend their voices to the atrocities of trying to live in the town. 17 years before the opening of the play, Hannibal show more stole the key to the bridge. The key allowed a gate to span the freeway allowing trucks and cars through as Hannibal’s father allowed. Since Hannibal stole the key, there is no way to guard the access of trucks through the town. As such, trucks speed by every 30-45 seconds making it impossible to cross. In spite of this, Toomey and Lily develop their own “sign” language and fall in love. They hatch a plan to runaway. Meg sees to it that when Hannibal returns, he does not ruin his brother’s life by stealing Lily. When Meg’s magic ring is returned to the Forest, life resumes to the idyllic time of days gone by.
Reflection:
This is a great play for middle or high school students to read and perform. Ms Aiken’s play is wonderfully written. She gives direction as to what needs to be staged for the play from a simple implementation to a full scale production. The book includes beautiful illustrations by Arvis Stewart that resemble wood cuts or at the very least, striking pen and ink drawings. The music interspersed in the play was written by John Sebastian Brown who is Ms. Aiken’s son. Ten songs (music and lyrics) appear at the end of the book. Surprisingly, this play (book) has been in the Library for over 30 years and has never been checked out. The book is a first edition which does not happen often in school libraries. I recently gave it a teacher to read and see if it would be of interest to students. He is working on developing a production of the play for next year. I enjoyed the simplicity of the play and the sweet love story complete with a villain. To produce this play would not be expensive. It would be a nice event for a school to produce and even use the occasion to raise funds for the arts programs that are suffering. show less
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Joan Delano Aiken was born in Rye, Sussex, England, on September 4, 1924, the daughter of the Pulitzer Prize winner, writer Conrad Aiken. She was raised in a rural area and home schooled by her mother until the age 12. She then attended Wychwood School, a boarding school in Oxford. Her work first appeared in 1941 when the British Broadcasting show more Corporation, where she worked as a librarian, broadcast some of her short stories on their Children's Hour program. Aiken also worked at St. Thomas's Hospital, and in 1943 she moved to the reference department of the London office of the United Nations, where she collected information about resistance movements. She worked for the UN until 1949, all the while continuing to write stories. In 1953 a collection of short fiction called All You've Ever Wanted and Other Stories was published. While writing The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, begun in 1952, her husband became ill and died of lung cancer in 1955. After working for five years as a copy editor at Argosy Magazine, and at the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Firm, she returned and finished the book in 1963. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award and was made into a successful film in 1988. In 1969 The Whispering Mountain won the Guardian Children's Book Award, and in 1972, Night Fall won America's Edgar Allen Poe Award for juvenile mystery. Aiken is best known for her adult "fantasy" stories. She has received awards for children's fiction and for mystery fiction, and has also written ''sequels'' to Jane Austen books. She collaborated with her daughter to write many episodes of her Arabel and Mortimer the raven series for the BBC. In all, Aiken wrote 92 novels - including 27 for adults - as well as plays, poems and short stories, although she was best known as a writer of children's stories. Joan Aiken died in January of 2004 at the age of 79. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- Street: A Play
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- English
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