Playhouse

Bausch (Before, During, After) delves into the dramas of a Memphis theater company in his intriguing if slow-going latest. While the Shakespeare Theater plans a production of King Lear to fund a lavish ongoing renovation, the lives of the main characters fall apart. Theater manager Thaddeus Deerforth’s wife, Gina Donato, the company’s chief set designer, considers ending their marriage, and Thaddeus wonders if her closeness to Reuben Frye, the visiting director in charge of their Lear, is to blame. Longtime lead actor Claudette Bradley is struggling to care for her father, a retired history teacher with memory loss, when her increasingly erratic actor ex-husband returns to Memphis after failing to find work in Los Angeles. There’s also former TV anchorman Malcolm Ruark, who lost his job after he caused an accident while driving drunk with his underage niece Mona Greer. Now divorced and unemployed, Malcolm attempts to start fresh by accepting a role in the play, but his efforts are complicated when Frye casts Mona as Cordelia. As Thaddeus, Claudette, and Malcolm reimagine their lives, the theater’s reconstruction comes to an unexpected end. Despite a meandering start, the novel offers a rewarding homage to both literary and human drama. It’s a little slack, but even so this will have special appeal to theater lovers. (Feb.)