A Favorite Review for FATEFUL ENCOUNTERS, Collected Stories & Plays

5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoy the Drama of these Stories and Plays, August 7, 2014
By H. Ackerman (NE PA)
This review is from: Fateful Encounters: Collected Stories & Plays (Paperback)
Joanne Weck's collection is well-named, for though the book contains eleven stories and three plays, most of the pieces have dramatic elements and turn on incidents which determine lives. If you enjoy the gesture, irony, and crisis of plays, you will find it easy to think of these characters and events as moving before you on the stage.

Most of the pieces focus on young women at critical moments in their lives. "Autumn Wedding" closes with a gesture: a girl forced into marriage moves her hand across her womb, as she might do at curtain, and the narrator like a stage manager rings it down with the last sentence, "She practiced smiling." "Hitchhiker" places a new bride in conflict with her husband; "A Bracelet of Glass Beads" finds a girl thrilled to start school until she learns she is the target of prejudice; "The Lost Sister" opens with nine-year-old Irene overhearing, in stage fashion, that her youngest sister will go to live with wealthier relatives and be raised as their daughter, perhaps to become a stranger.

Other women face their own problems. Rachel, a young mother, sees her bridal dreams fade and endures the brutality of a husband who cannot be coaxed away from alcohol. In one of the stories told in first person, "The Killer's Kid," a coed named Lesia tries to escape a tragic family history, but finds herself in a web of suspicion and paranoia when forced to share her dorm room with a new student whom she takes for a spy.

It must be noted that while these pieces present some male characters in a sympathetic light, very often they are the heavies, whether the boys who think nothing of a girl's virtue, or the father implicated in a murder, or the suspicious, sarcastic husband. Sometimes his failure is that he "tries to change [the woman] into someone else." It is the female characters, for the most part, who struggle, endure, and attempt to solve problems.

Besides the drama of the stories, readers will find three plays written as such. Waif, by far the longest piece in the collection, is a play in six scenes. Its conflicts begin when Suzanne, a teacher, becomes entangled in the family problems and personal issues of one of her students. Cassandra has run away from a father who may be abusing her and an adoptive mother who seems unable to deal with her. The play develops its impact, however, from the gradual identification of Suzanne, the mature, sympathetic teacher, with her rebellious student. In the end her caring for the girl pits her against the adults, raises ghosts of her own past, and threatens her career.

The three plays in Fateful Encounters have all been staged, and many of the short stories, if not all, could easily be so transformed. They depend not so much on description, mood, or nuance, as on conflict which alters lives. Enjoy the drama.

Harold Ackerman, Ph.D.