Jack L. B. Gohn
Writer, Critic & Playwright
New Book!
What I Was Listening to When . . .
A Memoir Set to Music
Jack L. B. Gohn
Writer, Critic & Playwright
Though I practiced law for over a third of a century,
I have been a writer from childhood.
And even with a full-time practice, I never really stopped publishing in various papers, magazines and journals. I was bound to reach a point eventually of deciding I wanted to be a writer and nothing else. This website features three things I do now that the point has been reached. I review theater, write plays, and for a decade and a half, wrote a column commenting on law and policy. Common to all these pursuits is a commitment to fact and principles. You can’t run a society or write a play (or about one) well without candor, consistency, and a sense of humaneness and decency. Embodied in these pages is the history of my efforts in each of these pursuits.
Plays by Jack Gohn
I largely write about lawyers, but these are not conventional lawyer dramas. There’s a story of how legal careers begin, another about how they (and others) end. There’s a ghost story. There’s a thriller that does not include a single courtroom scene. And, moving away from my former profession, there’s a play about God – maybe told from God’s perspective, maybe not. And there will be more.
Theater Reviews & Commentary
Most Recent Post
Children Will Listen
So what are we usually welcoming children to listen to when we take them to the theater? The key element, I think, is what Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism called mythos, the reduction to story form of socially agreed insights into the processes of life. Mythos is seldom presented pure in any art form, but these days the shows to which children are taken tend to mash together several of them to what I would consider an unprecedented extent, precisely because we are increasingly torn about what we impart to our children.
Theater Reviews & Commentary
Most Recent Post
Children Will Listen
So what are we usually welcoming children to listen to when we take them to the theater? The key element, I think, is what Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism called mythos, the reduction to story form of socially agreed insights into the processes of life. Mythos is seldom presented pure in any art form, but these days the shows to which children are taken tend to mash together several of them to what I would consider an unprecedented extent, precisely because we are increasingly torn about what we impart to our children.
