What do you think?
Rate this book
Oswald's Backyard
A full-length comical tragedy. In his backyard, Leo Oscar is the United States of America. Naïve, petulant and ultimately violent. Leo is at the center of our national obsession—the search for identity. He battles between idealism and a desire for fame. The television, the media, is his ultimate confirmation.
The play is set in New Orleans, September of 1963, in and out of Leo Oscar’s mind. He has managed to create a political commotion around himself that lands him a shot on a local TV talk show. It is the day the show airs, and it has become Leo’s passion—his big break. However, Leo’s story is complicated by a television that won’t work, the arrival of some unexpected house guests, and the return of an old friend. Leo is frustrated and humiliated until it is inevitable that he lashes out.
While the events in this play may closely resemble the real life Lee Harvey Oswald, this is fiction. The play does not address or rebut any particular conspiracy, but instead explores the psychological landscape of a young American man, driven to extremely desperate actions.
What am I but, a child in love
with the sound of his
own voice, his own name
repeating it over and over again.
Walt Whitman
The play is set in New Orleans, September of 1963, in and out of Leo Oscar’s mind. He has managed to create a political commotion around himself that lands him a shot on a local TV talk show. It is the day the show airs, and it has become Leo’s passion—his big break. However, Leo’s story is complicated by a television that won’t work, the arrival of some unexpected house guests, and the return of an old friend. Leo is frustrated and humiliated until it is inevitable that he lashes out.
While the events in this play may closely resemble the real life Lee Harvey Oswald, this is fiction. The play does not address or rebut any particular conspiracy, but instead explores the psychological landscape of a young American man, driven to extremely desperate actions.
What am I but, a child in love
with the sound of his
own voice, his own name
repeating it over and over again.
Walt Whitman
78 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 22, 2013
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 8, 2022
[Note: I wrote the below in 2004. I was fortunate to have seen and read many of the drafts and incarnations of this play prior to its final publication, as reflected here.]
Leslie Bramm's play is about dreams--the capitalized American Dream in particular--and what happens to people when they can't find the formula to make them come true. Bramm's protagonist is a terribly unassuming fellow named Leon Edward Oscar whose dream is, well, to be assuming. "I prefer to be called Leo," he repeats over and over during the play, as if that mere assertion of identity can somehow make him matter. His tragedy--for Oswald's Backyard is that, in more than one way--is his confusion of celebrity with self-worth. Unless he sees himself universally admired from a television screen, he seems not to exist at all.
Now, I haven't yet told you that Bramm has also very clearly given a date for this play--September 21, 1963, two months and one day before John F. Kennedy's assassination. Leo Oscar, married to a Russian woman named Rina, living in New Orleans but offered (during the play) a job in a warehouse in Dallas, infatuated with the Cuban Communist revolution and a would-be "agent" who spent time in Russia himself--well, he could well be Lee Harvey Oswald. One of the themes that Bramm is playing with in his play, I think, is the notion that a nobody who wants to be somebody might eventually be driven to do something very dramatic to get some attention.
But I don't think that's the main idea of Oswald's Backyard. This is a complicated, fascinating work, and the title and all the not-at-all coincidental congruencies between Leo and Lee are as much red herrings and/or background noise as they are keys to understanding what Bramm is doing here. We need to look at the rest of the puzzle the playwright has put before us.
The play begins with Leo, in a fantasy sequence, singing the lead role in Oklahoma!, starring on a TV talk show, and carrying on a conversation with his (imaginary) muse Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The lights change to indicate reality, and here we find Leo in his scrawny backyard, trying to repair a big old TV set that he has set up on blocks as though it were a car; attempts by his wife Rina to fix it by plugging it in are met with angry derision. Rina has just gotten her Grace Kelly fan club materials in the mail, and wishes loudly that she could be a movie star or the Princess of Monaco. She also brings unexpected news to her husband: she has invited some new acquaintances over for dinner, a married couple named George and Norma Jean. She announces in her broken English that George is a Texas "Jew emperor" (we learn that that means that he runs a "shoe emporium"). After a while, this formidable couple arrives on the scene, intent on seducing Leo and Rina; they are swingers, looking for new partners. Meanwhile, Leo's interview on a local talk show on TV--he is, he says, one of the brightest young political thinkers of his generation--is scheduled to air this very evening.
A full day; a full play. Bramm evokes not just the Kennedy assassination but a whole passel of mid-century iconography here: Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals, Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro, Hitchcock movies, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Leo's real tragedy is not just that he can't get anybody to take him seriously, but rather that all his attempts to overcome, overtake, or overthrow good old American voraciousness prove utterly futile. He's stuck in a culture he can't unmake.
Leslie Bramm's play is about dreams--the capitalized American Dream in particular--and what happens to people when they can't find the formula to make them come true. Bramm's protagonist is a terribly unassuming fellow named Leon Edward Oscar whose dream is, well, to be assuming. "I prefer to be called Leo," he repeats over and over during the play, as if that mere assertion of identity can somehow make him matter. His tragedy--for Oswald's Backyard is that, in more than one way--is his confusion of celebrity with self-worth. Unless he sees himself universally admired from a television screen, he seems not to exist at all.
Now, I haven't yet told you that Bramm has also very clearly given a date for this play--September 21, 1963, two months and one day before John F. Kennedy's assassination. Leo Oscar, married to a Russian woman named Rina, living in New Orleans but offered (during the play) a job in a warehouse in Dallas, infatuated with the Cuban Communist revolution and a would-be "agent" who spent time in Russia himself--well, he could well be Lee Harvey Oswald. One of the themes that Bramm is playing with in his play, I think, is the notion that a nobody who wants to be somebody might eventually be driven to do something very dramatic to get some attention.
But I don't think that's the main idea of Oswald's Backyard. This is a complicated, fascinating work, and the title and all the not-at-all coincidental congruencies between Leo and Lee are as much red herrings and/or background noise as they are keys to understanding what Bramm is doing here. We need to look at the rest of the puzzle the playwright has put before us.
The play begins with Leo, in a fantasy sequence, singing the lead role in Oklahoma!, starring on a TV talk show, and carrying on a conversation with his (imaginary) muse Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The lights change to indicate reality, and here we find Leo in his scrawny backyard, trying to repair a big old TV set that he has set up on blocks as though it were a car; attempts by his wife Rina to fix it by plugging it in are met with angry derision. Rina has just gotten her Grace Kelly fan club materials in the mail, and wishes loudly that she could be a movie star or the Princess of Monaco. She also brings unexpected news to her husband: she has invited some new acquaintances over for dinner, a married couple named George and Norma Jean. She announces in her broken English that George is a Texas "Jew emperor" (we learn that that means that he runs a "shoe emporium"). After a while, this formidable couple arrives on the scene, intent on seducing Leo and Rina; they are swingers, looking for new partners. Meanwhile, Leo's interview on a local talk show on TV--he is, he says, one of the brightest young political thinkers of his generation--is scheduled to air this very evening.
A full day; a full play. Bramm evokes not just the Kennedy assassination but a whole passel of mid-century iconography here: Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals, Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro, Hitchcock movies, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Leo's real tragedy is not just that he can't get anybody to take him seriously, but rather that all his attempts to overcome, overtake, or overthrow good old American voraciousness prove utterly futile. He's stuck in a culture he can't unmake.
Displaying 1 of 1 review