Central Park

Central Park


Central Park
a Conversation in Three Acts

by Michael Charles Tobias

ISBN: 9780927379250

A widower and widow — the “Baron” and Dora Lev — make each other’s acquaintance on a park bench somewhere in Manhattan’s Central Park. Their ensuing conversation encompasses not only the entire park, but the world.

Tobias has written a true masterpiece, truly out-of-sync with the rush of the mainstream. Rather, it is crafted, nurtured, magnificently rendered in an intoxicating, accessible style at once visionary and shamanic.

Michael Tobias has given his international readership in-depth, mystical inroads to the characters and circumstances that are fundamental to this unique genre; a merging of the forest, its ancestors and genetic future, with the far more “mundane” realities of everyday hopes and dreams, frustrations, tragedies and, to paraphrase psychologist Carl Jung, “the heroism of everyday.”

One of the world’s more prolific artists, Tobias quietly evinces — in this infectious conversation reminiscent of Goethe’s “Conversations With Eckermann” — an unforgettable relationship between the Baron, his pet squirrel Twinkle, and Dora. “Central Park” is a veritable history of landscape and biological aesthetics; a psychoanalysis of violence, a séance on mortality, a secret passage-way into the labyrinth of most poignant elderly love affairs, and, lastly, a towering and intoxicating testimony to humanity’s awesome paradox: namely, our ephemeral obsessions with intangible utopias whose mirror image is that of the yearning heart.

Rooted to a park bench in upper Manhattan, “Central Park” is one of the great theatre pieces of applied ethics, comparative philosophy, and emotional realism in the 21st century.