A Fool in the Forest.
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1963
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 430
First sentence: The year I was a senior in high school I made a great hit playing the lead in a mystery melodrama called The Rear Car.
Description: Jacket copy:

The TIME is summer, 1930

The PLACE is the Windflower Grove Amusement Park - two stones' throw from Cape Cod

The SCENE is the gay, tawdry, amoral, sometimes brutal world of a seedy summer stock company

Enter JEFF RAMSEY, fresh from a year of drama school and a middle-class Bostonian upbringing.  He is arrogant, shy, normally interested in sex, sensitive, unthinking - he is, in short, eighteen....

A Fool in the Forest is the story of Jeff Ramsey's unsentimental education at the hands of the pros from whom he must learn his craft - and one of his painful tutoring in the arts of love from simple sex to complex tenderness.  Onstage with the Windflower Grove Company, Jeff is under the direction of gifted, emotionally unstable Cyrus Lowell, who is willing to take an interest in his career - or break him.  Before him, Jeff has the example of the young leading man who has made his way up from the slums with Cyrus's help and is now sullenly paying for it.  He also receives the attentions of the leading lady, a buxomly beautiful, baby-voiced blonde.  And is surrounded by a troupe of seasoned veterans who regard him as an amateur, a threat to the sucess of their season.

Offstage, Jeff is free to explore the world of the amusement park - the dance hall, the woods rustling with lovers, the summer cottages occupied by working-class families as foreign to him as Zulus.  There he encounters tempestuous Vicki Cagliari and her pathetically self-effacing companion, Lucy - and becomes involved with both in his determined effort to lose his virginity.

Offstage and on, Jeff is destined to play the Fool.  As an actor he suffers the piercing agony of stage fright; as a man, he takes a humiliating beating from two local toughs; as a lover, he fails both Vicki and Lucy - and precipitates a bizarre domestic tragedy.  An apprentice in the world of illusion, he cannot escape the reality of human frailty and folly, or avoid the wisdom that comes with experience.

In A Fool in the Forest, Basil Burwell has re-created a kind of theater that has now vanished, made up of people who had played with Booth and cherished memories of Duse, refugees from dying vaudeville and doomed burlesque, of rustic farce and all-out melodrama.  But the play itself, on both sides of the footlights, is the Human Comedy.  And it is recognition - of the funny, foolish, bewildering journey to manhood - that rivets the reader's attention.

About the Author...

As an actor, Basil Burwell has appeared in repertory throughout the United States and with the London Group Theatre.  As a director, he has worked extensively in summer theaters and winter stock companies, including five years as Director of the Silvermine Guild Players.  As a writer, he has published a book of verse, a previous novel, and short stories in a variety of magazines.  He is currently at work on a book on acting in collaboration with Uta Hagen.  As a teacher, he is head of the Drama Department at the Cherry Lawn School, Darien, Connecticut.
Notes: A Fool in the Forest also appeared as a paperback published by Signet in December, 1964.
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