In the morning, the fourth-years find themselves facing their very own tragedy, and their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, each other, and themselves that they are innocent. In this secluded world of firelight and leather-bound books, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingénue, extras.īut in their fourth and final year, good-natured rivalries turn ugly, and on opening night real violence invades the students’ world of make-believe. Detective Colborne wants to know the truth, and after ten years, Oliver is finally ready to tell it.Ī decade ago: Oliver is one of seven young Shakespearean actors at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, a place of keen ambition and fierce competition. On the day Oliver Marks is released from jail, the man who put him there is waiting at the door. Unfolding with a propulsive ferocity, These Violent Delights is an exquisitely plotted excavation of the depths of human desire and the darkness it can bring forth in us. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian is also volatile and capriciously cruel, and Paul becomes increasingly afraid that he can never live up to what Julian expects of him.Īs their friendship spirals into all-consuming intimacy, they each learn the lengths to which the other will go in order to stay together, their obsession ultimately hurtling them toward an act of irrevocable violence. Paul will stop at nothing to prove himself worthy of their friendship, because with Julian life is more invigorating than Paul could ever have imagined. Paul sees Julian as his sole intellectual equal-an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate’s effortless charm. Sensitive, insecure, and incomprehensible to his grieving family, Paul feels isolated and alone. When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, it’s with the hope of moving past the recent death of his father.

Calamity physics