On Demand
Selected Shorts
Sunday, April 15, 2007
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What do Women Want?
"Courting a wife takes ten-fold the strength of winning any…girl.”
—John Updike, “Wife Wooing.”
Intriguing tales—and tails—involving strong women.
What unites the three stories to be heard on this radio edition of SELECTED SHORTS is that each has a powerful central woman character who is disturbing (not always unpleasantly) and mysterious.
What do women want? Well, the program begins with a story about a woman who, in fact, GETS what she wants. (And you’ll see what it does for her.) It, and the title of the story, is “The Red Fox Fur Coat”. Its author is Teolinda Gersao, a winner of the PEN Club Fiction Prize and other awards, several of whose stories have been adapted for the stage and produced in Portugal, Germany, and Romania. She was Writer in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. The reader is Tony Award-winning, Kathleen Chalfant, a SHORTS regular.
The second story came from an evening entitled “Marital Matters”, which was part of our 2005 “Love Story Weekend” series at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Even a contented marriage produces moments of longing and disappointment, and in “Wife Wooing” short story master John Updike has created an almost Joycean paean to married love. Listen for the ways in which Updike repeats the “w” sound in a string of words like woman, wife, wide, womb, and so forth, as read by stage and screen star Alec Baldwin, whose recent work includes the role of Pan Am founder Juan Trippe in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and a much lauded role as a buttoned down corporate type in the television series Rock 30.
The author of our final story about mysterious women, “The Woman at the Store”, is the New Zealand-born writer, Katherine Mansfield who lived from 1888 until 1923, dying young of tuberculosis. In this tale set in the wilds of New Zealand sheep-ranching country, disturbing undercurrents suggest a secret, hidden from the weary riders who spend the night at an isolated way station. The story is read by Peter Gerety, who has acted in over a hundred stage productions on Broadway and at The Trinity Rep in Providence, Rhode Island, but is probably best known to audiences for his role as a tough cop on the television series Homicide,
“The Red Fox Fur Coat,” by Teolinda Gersao, read by Kathleen Chalfant “Wife Wooing,” by John Updike, read by Alec Baldwin “The Woman at the Store,” by Katherine Mansfield, read by Peter Gerety
For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit Symphony Space
What do women want? Well, the program begins with a story about a woman who, in fact, GETS what she wants. (And you’ll see what it does for her.) It, and the title of the story, is “The Red Fox Fur Coat”. Its author is Teolinda Gersao, a winner of the PEN Club Fiction Prize and other awards, several of whose stories have been adapted for the stage and produced in Portugal, Germany, and Romania. She was Writer in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. The reader is Tony Award-winning, Kathleen Chalfant, a SHORTS regular.
The second story came from an evening entitled “Marital Matters”, which was part of our 2005 “Love Story Weekend” series at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Even a contented marriage produces moments of longing and disappointment, and in “Wife Wooing” short story master John Updike has created an almost Joycean paean to married love. Listen for the ways in which Updike repeats the “w” sound in a string of words like woman, wife, wide, womb, and so forth, as read by stage and screen star Alec Baldwin, whose recent work includes the role of Pan Am founder Juan Trippe in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and a much lauded role as a buttoned down corporate type in the television series Rock 30.
The author of our final story about mysterious women, “The Woman at the Store”, is the New Zealand-born writer, Katherine Mansfield who lived from 1888 until 1923, dying young of tuberculosis. In this tale set in the wilds of New Zealand sheep-ranching country, disturbing undercurrents suggest a secret, hidden from the weary riders who spend the night at an isolated way station. The story is read by Peter Gerety, who has acted in over a hundred stage productions on Broadway and at The Trinity Rep in Providence, Rhode Island, but is probably best known to audiences for his role as a tough cop on the television series Homicide,
“The Red Fox Fur Coat,” by Teolinda Gersao, read by Kathleen Chalfant “Wife Wooing,” by John Updike, read by Alec Baldwin “The Woman at the Store,” by Katherine Mansfield, read by Peter Gerety
For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit Symphony Space
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