Book Review: Counting Sheep

Book Review: Counting Sheep: The Log and Complete Play of Sheep on the Runway

Author: Art Buchwald

Date: 1970

Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons

ISBN: none

Length: 219 pages

Illustrations: black-and-white photo insert

Quote: “Writing plays is pretty tough in Washington. Writing about anything except politics is pretty tough.”

So he wrote a play about how the American embassy destroys a small mythical Asian kingdom, not so much because the ambassador’s bratty kid wants to protest everything, nor because the embassy’s butler is a spy, but most visibly because a planeload of American “experts” want to sell the country a lot of things nobody really needs. Before the audience’s eyes, the peaceful kingdom is reduced to a banana republic whose prince has declared the whole embassy persona non grata.

Any resemblance to any small Asian countries our government was trying to help, at the time, is of course purely intentional, and the ethical acceptability of producing this play in 1970 was very questionable...but Buchwald’s light touch apparently made Sheep on the Runway acceptable. We all know the sequel: Buchwald became one of America’s best known and best loved syndicated satirists.

Sheep on the Runway, however, did not become a classic play. It went the way of almost all modern plays: it was protected by copyright laws, so while the author was waiting to sell it to Hollywood (or in this case writing witty newspaper columns) the student drama groups that keep live theatre alive, in most of the United States, were saying “We can’t afford it” and doing something by Shakespeare, or else by Gilbert & Sullivan, again. Too bad. Sheep on the Runway is quite funny.

Anyway, the book is now somewhat obscure. Many people became Buchwald fans only after Counting Sheep went off the market...Buchwald has fans who are younger than the book is. This means that, for Buchwald collectors, the book is a Rare Find.