Composers and their stage works 



 

Lullaby

Comedy. Don Appell. 2 men, 2 women. 2 Interiors

Johnny Horton, a truck driver, runs away from home at the age of 38. He elopes to Scranton with Eadie Jackson, a brassy cigarette girl, whom lit has met and married all inside of 3 days. He has done so in an effort to break away from his dominating mother. Eadie has "been around" quite a bit in her time and it is during the honeymoon night that the realization comes to her that she has married a shy, awkward Herculean man who is nothing more than a mommas boy. The mother in the meantime has discovered Johnny's whereabouts and comes after him in an effort to avoid what to her would be a catastrophe. She arrives at their hotel the morning following their wedding night, and after threatening to have a heart attack, to jump out of window, and to go to an old ladies' home, she is finally forced to concede the marriage. She manipulates the young couple into coming home to live with her. Eadie is reluctant to do so, but for Johnny's sake, agrees, hoping that it will all turn out for the best. From here on, the play concerns itself with the mother's machinations to get herself reinstated into their apartment, splitting the couple into separate bedrooms and finally almost breaking up the marriage completely. How she is outwitted by Johnny, and the manner in which the couple finally go off to a place of their own, is told in a most hilarious fashion.
ISBN: 0-8222-0707-9

Lunatic and Lover

Play. Michael Meyer. 3 men, 3 women. Unit Set.

One of the theatres most creative geniuses, August Strindberg was a marl driven by demons: his tortured self-doubt about the value of his work; and his compulsively destructive relationships with the women who obsessed him. Alienated from his stern father and stepmother, Strindberg drifted into the theatre and a stormy liaison with the beautiful actress Siri von Essen, the wife of his benefactor, Baron Wrangle. When their subsequent marriage was destroyed by Siri's involvement with another woman, Strindberg embarked on two more ill-fated relationships, first with the brilliant journalist Frida Uhl and then with a young actress, Harriet Bosse -always searching for, but never finding, a true and enriching partnership. The frustrations of his personal life were reflected in his art, with his creative brilliance largely unrecognized until, ironically, he was too old and sick to savor the plaudits, bestowed on him by the following generations.

The Lunatic View

Four Comedies of Menace. David Campton

A Smell of Burning
M2 Fl. A living-room.

An insight into the vulnerability of the 'little man' to officialdom and its impersonal dictates personified by a bickering married couple and a man from the City Surveyor's department.

Memento Mori
M2. A room in an empty house.
 
An elderly estate agent is trying to sell a young man an old house in a bad state of repair. Or is he? 
 
Getting and Spending
M2 F2. A room.
 
Newlyweds Bobby and Evelyn enter their new house full of ideas for the future but life passes without their plans coming to fruition.  
 
Then ...
M1 F1 .
 
Touching and illuminating, this plays deals with the last two survivors of a nuclear holocaust who fall in love.
 

Luther

Play. John Osborne
M12 Fl. Extras. Various interior and exterior settings.

A brilliant study of a rebel. Luther, perhaps the first real Protestant, outspoken, fearless critic of High Church hypocrisy is, nevertheless, a very ordinary monk. We see his acceptance into the brotherhood, his subsequent doubts and his preoccupation with health, his uncompromising attack on the abuse of Indulgences and his refusal to capitulate before the Diet of Worms. The play provides a wide variety of challenging, rewarding parts but the production itself demands nothing lavish. Period 1506-27

Luv

Comedy. Murray Schisgal. 2 men, 1 woman. Exterior.

When the play begins there is Harry Berlin, looking like a shaved, mustachioed beatnik who has sunk so low that honest beatniks would disown him. He has no future except to jump off the bridge and is about to do so when Milt Manville comes along and intervenes. Milt and Harry turn out to be college classmates. As Harry, in his rags, slowly drops hints of his tale of woe, Milt, a picture of prosperity, is all sympathy. But Luv has ample place in its bosom for more than one miserable fellow. Milt is also full of frustration, for his wife won't release him and let him marry the girl he loves. Presently Milt's wife, Ellen, appears. As she stands under a lamppost, her expression congealed and fur-coated body rigid, it is clear that she, too, is torn by anguish. Now we have a triangle matched in misery. Milt has had an inspiration. Why not bring Ellen and Harry together and thus win the freedom to marry the other girl? But Ellen looks despairing; she needs sprucing up. Milt tidies her dress and slip, combs her hair, rouges her lips, powders her cheeks, delicately touches up her eyelashes and sprays her with perfume. Could a husband be more tender with a wife he hopes to palm off? The events that follow mean that whatever marriages are made and unmade, Milt, Ellen and Harry end up in sorrow and agony; and the greater their misunderstandings and problems, the more you laugh.
ISBN: 0-8222-0709-5

Lydie Breeze

Play. John Guare. 4 men, 3 women. Exterior/Interior

The story takes place in 1895, in a weather-beaten beach house on Nantucket Island, formerly the centre of an idealistic commune. The hopes of this noble experiment had been destroyed by adultery, murder and suicide, and now those haunted by the tragedy gather to seek its expiation: the patriarch; Joshua Hickman, now pardoned for killing his wife's lover; his young daughter, Lydie, the namesake of her long dead mother, a suicide; his oldest daughter; Gussie, the secretary-mistress of a U.S. Senator; and Jeremiah Grady, the long-lost son of the murdered lover. Moving from comedy to melodrama as it untangles the twisted strands of their lives, the play illuminates both the undying optimism which underlies the American ethos and, through the metaphor of syphilis, the. endemic corruption which, so often, can reach beyond its own time to subvert the cherished hopes of the future.
ISBN: 0-8222-0710-9

Lysistrata

Aristophanes. Trans P. Dickinson
3m 4f, chorus. Classical satire. Flexible staging.

First performed 411 BC - it is Athens, and the Peloponnesian War seems endless. Lysistrata summons all the women of Greece to take over public affairs and try to manage them more effectively than the men. In order to encourage the men to agree to peace, they withhold sex from their husbands - with tumescent results.
ISBN 1 85459 325 0