There’s a new kid on the cyberblock, a child of mixed parentage and ambivalent identity. The Good Ear Review is an online literary magazine that celebrates the art of the dramatic monologue—short one-character sketches that capture character, place and circumstance efficiently and entertainingly.
But it’s more than that. Go to the website, thegoodearreview.com, and you’ll see that it’s done up in the style of a Victorian literary journal. The logo is an 1860s daguerreotype image of a man with one drooping eyelid that makes him almost look like he’s winking. Which is fitting. For while GER‘s contents are genuine contemporary examples of minimalist drama, its packaging is a wickedly amusing parody of 19th-century English life and letters.
The conceit is that the journal was founded 147 years ago and is still going, with the same editorial staff. Its “Editor-in-Chief” is Tristram Stjohn Bexindale-Webb (“knighthood pending”), without whom, the page proclaims, “many urchins would be acquiring their Chimney Maintenance Certification instead of fetching his house slippers and proofing complex sentences.”
The all-female support staff, represented by straitlaced period photographs, includes Insignificance McCluster, the office’s “general dogsbody,” whose inability to multitask “has invited the office nickname McClusterfuck.”
GER‘s creator is K.D. Halpin, a writer/performer who splits her time between Northampton and Belfast, Northern Ireland. She’s remembered here as a member of the political comedy troupe Sleeveless Theater and for solo performances that included a collection of original monologues, Weird Without Apology. She says she created the new site as a venue for monologues, which she considers an undervalued, reader-friendly form of dramatic writing, and added the whimsical superstructure “just for shits and giggles.”
“I think it’s an attractive package for someone who may not ordinarily read plays, as an introduction to reading theater,” she says. She solicits manuscripts from all over the English-speaking world, looking for original, stand-alone pieces “that share a moment in time with the reader,” in any style and from both established and emerging playwrights. Theater, Halpin stresses, “isn’t so much about what someone says, but what’s behind what they’re saying. So I’m interested in how the author is conveying it, how they’re dramatizing it.”
The GER site also features faux advertisements of the kind that might appear in a Victorian periodical, with actual period illustrations. One promotes Snodgripp & Sons’ Impossibly-Shaped Bicycles: “Difficult to mount, slightly less difficult to ride.” An image of three sullen-looking children promises, in Dickensian fashion, that “Dr. Brimstone’s Joy-snuffing Elixir & Compound turns spirited children into pensive adults.” In a Situations Wanted ad, a would-be hermit seeks “a well-appointed garden shed or cave” on a country estate. “I require very little upkeep… am suitably apoplectic, adequately eccentric, and erudite in my mutterings.”
Manuscripts of 600-1,000 words may be submitted to thegoodearreview.com, where they will be carefully reviewed by the Editor-in-Chief, who, in his own modest assessment, is “the best judge of all things.”
