Am I Blue (ISBN 082220021X)

Great Characters:
I have never read a young character with so much personality, quirkiness and truth as Ashbe is at the age of sixteen in "Am I Blue?" If only they would write more characters like this for young actors to perform. I am directing this show for a night of one acts this fall and I envy the girl who gets to play Ashbe. The play itself is strange and wonderful and thought provoking. These characters talk about sex and love and friends and foes and don't make any excuses about it. A true gem.

Lovely losers:
Henley's gift is her pure love for her misfit characters. She writes with compassion and honesty about lovely, misbegotten outcasts. "Ashbe" in "Am I Blue" is the quintessential Henley character and it's impossible to read or see the play without loving her. I've directed the show, and spent the whole production period crazy about her. One of my favorite plays by one of my favorite writers.

no.:
Once you get passed the awkward dialouge, the contrived plot, the obnoxious metaphors and the simplistic characters there is really not much left to this play.

THE BEST CONTEMPORARY PLAY I'VE READ:
Tom Stoppard and Mamet and Ives are all great. But they can't compete with a woman like Beth Henley when it comes to creating what true art is meant to bring forth: a sense of connection between people, recognizing yourself and others in an indescribable way, and honesty. No pretentious intellectual mindplay. Just beauty and reality. That is what makes Henley so great, but I can't even begin to say why 'Am I blue' is by far her best play, her most beautiful one, and probably the most poignant contemporary play I've read, period. It's a play the audience, regardless of whether you watch a stage production or just read it, can taste. Experiencing this play is like seeing a multitude of colors flowing like music across the page, and in your mind. The two main characters and the relationship they form as a result of a strange meeting in a bar, can only be described as funny and sweet, saying everything about human nature and what we need right there. A underage nuisance harrasing the customers ends up pestering a boy unhappily awaiting a 'date' with a prositute his buddies pushed him into. The characters are different in many aspects of personality and circumstance, but share a loneliness which, of course, connects them together. Henely always has such interesting, seemingly simple yet always complex characters, that often strike one as a bit eccentric; yet by the end of her plays the audience realizes that the characters are no more then themselves and everyone around them. 'Am I blue' flows like a river of reflection and truth, and it is effortless to read because of its understated beauty. That is the key to Beth Henely's plays, subtelty and truth. I think she wrote 'Am I blue' in college; it is fresh and uninhibited as a result. This is a perfect play, if there is such a thing.

How terribly "modern.":
A really horrible play, if it can be called even that. 'Am I Blue' was written for a play-writing class, and it certainly shows. I've had discussions with more depth, subtlty and wit in a High-School Cafeteria, which appears to be the same place Henley is getting her dialogue. Blatantly obvious character psychology; insipid symbolism; insultingly pointless (and wholly unamusing) plot wrapped in a pseudo-psychiatric one-liner resolution. Those other reviewers drooling over the character of Ashbe are probably remembering her from one of the other thousand-and-one plays in which the playful-rogue-innocent stock character has been (over)used. In fact, doing away with the pretentiousness of giving her characters names as though they were actual -characters-, and simply stating "Enter Clown" would have been an improvement Henley's work. How this got past the teacher's desk and onto the legitimate stage is beyond me, but whatever literary trend it reflects, I weep. The play in a word: frivolous.