Author: E. Lockhart aka Emily Jenkins
Publisher: Hyperion
Rating: WORTHY!
It was an absolute necessity to read Dramarama (or something by Lockhart) after falling in love with Frankie Landau-Banks whose story I actually want to read again now that it's entered my head!
Demi (Demmy, not D'mee) and Sadye (Say-Dee) met at an audition for the prestigious Wildewood Academy and became fast friends because they both have a huge passion for theater, not to say theatricals, and such fine companions are hard to come by in their little podunk town in Ohio, which both of them want desperately to escape.
They’re successful in their auditions and go happily to Wildewood for the summer, where Demi shines because he can act, sing, dance, and is good looking, plus he doesn’t suffer from nerves. In contrast, a very nervous Sadye performed badly at her 'getting to know you' audition, and because of that, failed to find a place in any of the main plays the school was putting on that summer. She did get a place in two others: a minor role in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and an equally minor role in the so-called 10-Day Wonder - a play which they throw together with vast speed just for the heck of it, which that year was to be Guys and Dolls.
Demi narrates this story and she's bunked with three other girls: Nanette, Iz, and Candie, with all of whom she has issues, but which are relatively minor irritations, not large problems. Not only does she screw-up with her audition, she also screws-up by being five minutes late for her first acting class which is being taught by the school's program manager: a successful Broadway musical director. This causes her further humiliation as the whole class is then required to lay on their backs for the entire class period, contemplating how they can absorb their passion for acting into every cell of their body, and every thought in their mind, every move they make, and every object in their possession.
Sadye discovers that since she has a minor role in the Shakespeare play, she will also have to play one of the trees! The play's director is a woman who thinks it's cool that the actors not only act, but embrace the entire set, posing as trees, their poses reflecting the mood of the scene being portrayed at the time. Sadye's experience of drama school is not performing to her expectations!
Dramarama is really a redux of The Dispreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks or rather, it’s vice-versa since the former came out the year before the latter. Both stories concern a disaffected mid-teen girl who is not your usual YA girl, who gets disruptive/seditious, and for whom things end badly. Not disastrously badly, but sadly badly. Sadye argues with her teachers, misbehaves a bit, and ends up taking the fall for her best friend over something for which he honestly should shoulder the much larger share of the blame. But she does this knowingly and willingly, taking the decision herself and based in her desire to see him not robbed of his dream. She realizes that she cannot be what she dreamed, that her childhood dream is nothing more than a fairy tale out of which she must now grow, but as the ending shows, grow she does. She grows a new dream pursues that instead.
This ending is sad in many ways, not least of which because Sadye deserves a voice and is not granted one - not at Wildewood. This is something which happens to all-too-many people, and women in particular seem to feel it worst. Sadye stops being solely a sponge at Wildewood, and starts exuding comments and suggestions, none of which is ever listened to. Whether she's right to do so or not is addressed in an exchange between her and Demi. Demi is all kow-tow because he says that's what they're there for, and he really wants to learn everything he can from the experts. Sadye is all "that's fine as far as it goes", but she thought that this was supposed to be a collaboration. Neither of them is one hundred percent correct. The decent answer is somewhere in the middle, but Lockhart isn't about compromise or truly happy endings. She's all about he real world: real (and of course, flawed) people who do not excel and are not perfect, and for whom life doesn't have miraculous endings or end up as a neatly packaged duty-free which will meet her on the plane, and I love her for it, so yes, I am going to look for more of her books, and yes, this is another big worthy for her in my book.
