Easy Outs: or The Adventures of Alphonse on the Lam

Set in 1969, at the height of the Viet Nam war, Easy Outs, tells the story of Alphonse, a young man who dodges the draft, and goes off looking for an alternative to America, but can’t find it anywhere. When Alphonse rows off to "a small, neutral, peace-loving country, to become a simple craftsman", he is promptly drafted into their small, neutral, peace-loving army. When he escapes, he becomes an unwitting figurehead for a homegrown revolution, whose results are more horrific than he could have imagined. Written in a hilarious borscht-belt farce style reminiscent of early Woody Allen, and classic Mel Brooks, Easy Outs is an undiscovered time-capsule of a period whose conflicts, and questions, of personal authenticity, and political compromise, remain with us today, and its eerie accuracy in predicting cultural trends, and the future of terrorism, make it seem as if it had been written in retrospect, rather than as a contemporary work. Heir to a tradition of low-brow/high-brow, political comedy stretching back to the Marx Brothers, Easy Outs, is a lost classic whose time has come again.