Butterflies are Free (Acting Edition) [Paperback]

"Butterflies are free, and so are we," sings Don Baker, the play's hero. 20-something and blind, Don has just escaped the binds of his overprotective family in Scarsdale, NY, and found solace in an East Village apartment. As he is learning to survive on his own, he meets Jill Tanner, the 19-year old actress who lives next door. Jill is a free spirit, a former hippie, a sweet, impressionable, ditzy-yet-perceptive girl. She has never known the word "commitment" or its meaning. Don has never known freedom.

A match is made even through their differences. Don and Jill start to fall for each other, Jill never giving much thought to the fact that Don is blind. That is, until Don's mother appears on the scene, eager to take her son back to Scarsdale. What transpires is a battle to free Don of the perennial 'apron-strings' that bind him. Jill discovers that she must give up some of her freedom if she wants to be with Don, and Mrs. Baker must give her son more if she truly loves him.

Leonard Gershe uses humor and pervasive sarcasm to chip away at the intensity of the storyline. He shows how love can help a person change themselves, and does so in a way that can only be described as enthralling. As riske and hilariously funny as it is in the first act is how touching, bittersweet, and poignant it is in the second. It is a human, universal story, a beautiful way of describing different types of love.

I started reading this book while babysitting. I knew i was going to be babysitting for 8 hours and i needed something to do. I had to read a short play for my english class and i was recommended this book. The first page simply took my breath away. It started the way that i love every book to start! It got me so interested that I could not put the book down! I literallly could not put the book down. I was so interested that I forgot that i was babysitting. The book made me cry and i loved it. It is a great way to show the different kinds of love that people go through and the denials that people are put through because they are afraid of committment. This book took me a total of an hour to read it. started crying because the book was so beautiful and i was also sad that it was over! Its only 80 pages. So, if you have an hour free, take the time to read this book! I highly recommend it!

Although a number of memorable plays and films featured characters with various disabilities and handicaps, including blindness, it wasn't really until the 1960s that blindness as such became the focus of the material. Two plays in particular, and the films based on them, brought blindness to the fore: Frederick Knott's 1966 thriller WAIT UNTIL DARK and Leonard Gershe's 1969 comedy-drama BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE. It would be difficult to imagine two more different plays, but between the two they altered public perception of how blind people dealt with their disability and how effectively they could operate in the "sighted" world.

BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE was suggested by the life of Harold Krents (1944-1987), who was so skillful that he attained national celebrity when his local draft board refused to believe he was in fact blind and classified him as eligible for military duty. Kent, who studied at Harvard and Oxford and became a noted Washington D.C. attorney, worked closely with playwright Leonard Gershe, serving as technical advisor to the play and ensuring that the play depicted both blindness and the coping skills the blind use in an accurate and unsentimental manner.

Set in the late 1960s, the play concerns Don Baker, a young blind man who has spent his life being cared for by his wealthy family--but who now feels that he spent his life inside a comfortable but restrictive cocoon. Desperate to break out, he leaves his mother's Scarsdale home for a low-rent apartment in New York, where his next door neighbor turns out to be Jill, a free-spirited hippie chick who has lived her life running from emotional responsibilities. Jill is astonished to learn that Don is blind; she is also sexually and emotionally attracted to him, and the two soon begin an affair. But they reckon without Don's mother, who appears on the scene determined to coax Don back to the safety of home. And she is not above playing on Jill's resistence to emotional involvement to motivate Don to come back home.

At the time, BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE was considered a bit of a sexual shocker, for Jill takes Don to bed in a very casual manner--and much of the second act is played with the actors stripped down to their underwear after clearly having spent the past few hours in bed with each other. It wasn't something that was done on Broadway at the time, and one reason the play sold so well was the titillation factor involved. But audiences that came to the play just for the sight of skin also found themselves at an extremely well-written comedy-drama with very strong dramatic underpinnings: how blind people manage in the sighted world, the many challenges they face and risks the must take, and to top it off the story of a mother so concerned for her son that she would rather suffocate him than let him take the risks necessary for him to grow up.

The script is particularly memorable for its witty zingers, and although these do not always read well on the page I have seen the play in an excellent production and can attest to the fact that they do indeed work on the stage; the audience roars with laughter. Yes, BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE is indeed a "light" play, but it's light qualities are supported by supported by excellent construction and thematic foundations that continue to resonate. Strongly recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

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