Earshot

by Morris Panych

Doyle has a very funny he hears too much. He can hear the most intimate details of the lives of everyone living in his apartment building. He can tell the temperature of a young neighbour’s bath water by the resonance of her pipes; he knows where the old lady’s lost teeth are by the way they rattle in their glass when her appliances turn on; he can hear letters of rejection slip from slackened fingers and settle to the ground like the crashing leaves of autumn.

Doyle blames his hyper-sensitive condition on a physical abnormality, on a birth defect in his ears. But we are not so sure. Paralysing Doyle with a cacophony of detail and minutiae, Earshot offers us the gift of a comic Hamlet ―a perfectly dark comedy for the information age.

Genres: Plays

64 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2000

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5, rounded up.

Panych is something of an acquired taste, but is also a largely undiscovered Canadian treasure. I've loved the three previous plays of his I've read, and like those, this is quirky, dark, but also very funny. It's basically a long monologue from Doyle, a man with extra sensitive hearing, who spends his days and nights eavesdropping on his neighbors - so along with him, we get to know his neighbors on either side of his apartment, as well as those who live above and below him. It's an inventive premise, that surprisingly works quite well.

[Leonard Bacica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good monologue, ties it geographically by a few North American references, but they can easily be removed or adapted.