The Death of the Siamese Twins and Other Plays

The Death of the Siamese Twins and Other Plays
Louis Phillips
World Audience Inc
ISBN: 978-1-934209-30-1
Drama, Theater, Plays
Reviewed by Lee Gooden

To say Louis Phillips is writer would be an injustice. To say Louis Phillips is a great writer would also be a disservice. True, Phillips is a playwright, poet, short story and children’s author, publishing some 35 books for children and adults; still, the solitary title of brilliant word-smith is not correct. Phillips is also a magician, an anthropologist, a surgeon and teacher. He boasts no formal training in any of those fields, but he has the traits of those practitioners combined with incredible writing abilities.
His collection of plays, The Death of the Siamese Twins and Other Plays, is the proof.
The first play (and title of the collection) The Death of the Siamese Twins is reminiscent of Edward Albee’s disturbing theatrical adaptation of Carson McCullers’ classic novella, The Ballad of the Sad Caf. Both plays exude a painful angst and haplessness that is strangely beautiful in a Sartre, Becket, Pinterish existential way. Phillips used his magical anthropological, surgeon abilities to reveal through the so-called freak how selfish and grotesque all of humanity can be.
In the arrangement of his collection he wisely breaks up the reader’s emotions by providing short comedies that act as a bridge between the more serious pieces. For example, the hilarious play Penguins and the genius but loony play, Percussion are situated between the darker play, The Death of The Siamese Twins and the seemingly Lorca, Hemingway inspired solemn play, Night Fishing in the Antibes. Farther into his collection Phillips provides the eyebrow raising Hamlet-what if; play, Foils, to the superb vaudevillian Tragedy: A Comedy. At the conclusion of his collection, Phillips includes the b-movie Stoppard like play, Caravan and finishes with the play, Termites, an original twist of Kafka’s Metamorphoses, with some of Camus’ The Stranger, a pinch of an amalgam Stephen King/Clive Barker and the pagan sexually charged religiosity of Albee’s play, Tiny Alice.
Louis Phillips’ collection of plays, The Death of The Siamese Twins and Other Plays is an important addition to the canon of twentieth and twenty-first century American playwrights and dramatic/theatrical literature.