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    A Study Guide for Warren Leight's "Side Man"
    A Study Guide for Warren Leight's "Side Man"
    A Study Guide for Warren Leight's "Side Man"
    Ebook37 pages29 minutes

    A Study Guide for Warren Leight's "Side Man"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Warren Leight's "Side Man," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 3, 2016
    ISBN9781535833110
    A Study Guide for Warren Leight's "Side Man"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Warren Leight's "Side Man" - Gale

      1

      Side Man

      Warren Leight

      1998

      Introduction

      Warren Leight first published his Tony Award–winning play Side Man in 1998 in the United States. Inspired by his own autobiographical experiences in the music industry—his father was a jazz musician—the play also was inspired by the decline of the jazz industry itself. This memory play differs from similar works because the narrator, Clifford, remembers back to times before he was even born. Through these flashbacks, Clifford, who also talks directly to the audience members, drawing them into the action, chronicles the life and death of his parents' relationship, a dysfunctional pairing that has had disastrous effects on Clifford's own views of life. The narrative also makes uses of jarring time-and-place shifting effects, as Clifford's story takes the audience back and forth from 1953 to 1985 and to various points in between. These chaotic transitions help to highlight the chaos of Clifford's life and his parents' relationship, as well as their failed dreams and irresponsible behaviors. At the same time, this combined effect helps to underscore the decline and fall of jazz and big band music, beginning in the 1950s as it was replaced by rock and roll and other forms of popular music. Side Man was the work that made Leight famous on Broadway, but in 2003, Leight returned to similar material when he published Glimmer, Glimmer, and Shine, another play about the pitfalls of the jazz life. Side Man is available in a 1998 paperback edition from Grove Press.

      Author Biography

      Leight was born on January 15, 1957, in New York City. When he was sixteen, he began attending Stanford University, where he studied journalism. In interviews, Leight has noted that Side Man touches on issues that were relevant to his own childhood. So much so, in fact, that the author notes that it was a difficult play for him to write. However, Leight is quick to note that many of the specific situations in the play were invented for dramatic purposes and that the play is not totally autobiographical.

      In his early twenties, Leight ran into a woman whom he had a crush on in high school and decided on a whim to follow her to China, where she was going to teach English. At this point, in the early 1980s, Leight was exposed to much of the paranoia in the late Cold

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