 |
|
Me
and Jezebel
Comedy Elizabeth L. Fuller. 1 woman; 2 women (or 1 man, 1 woman). Unit Set It all starts when a mutual friend brings Bette Davis to Elizabeth
Fuller's house for dinner. Davis calls the next day to thank Elizabeth
for the lovely dinner (although the chicken was a bit raw), and to
ask if she could possibly impose and stay with her for a couple of
days (no more than three) while a hotel strike runs its course in
New York. Fuller, a life-long fan, can hardly refuse. But trouble
soon begins as Davis arrives with a station wagon full of belongings
and, moves right in. Davis quickly dominates the lives of Elizabeth,
her husband, John, and their young son, Christopher, who begins imitating
Davis' tones and, worse, her language; as does Elizabeth, who desperately
wants to form a real friendship with her idol. Elizabeth tells Davis
stories of how she and her grandmother used to go to Davis' double
features and write her fan letters. Oblivious to the Fuller family,
Davis decides what they will have for dinner, when they will go to
the beach and speaks her mind on everything from child-rearing and
spiritualism to Paul Newman and, of course, Joan Crawford. As the
days progress it becomes clear that Davis thrives on conflict and
high tension, and that she is only truly happy when she is stirring
things up. The month vacillates between highs - watching Jezebel on
the late movie together - and lows - when John threatens to move
out if Davis doesn't leave. Then, on the 32nd day of her stay, the
hotel strike ends, and Davis departs as quickly as she arrived. But
she leaves behind a gracious thank you letter and, as Bette Davis
herself might have said, one hell of a good story. NOTE: Both the
one and two-person version are included in a single volume. Play. Mary Agnes Donoghue Louise's Los Angeles house is rapidly turning into rubble as her
architect husband David takes a sledgehammer to it as effectively
as he has to their marriage. Louise escapes her unhappiness through
fantasies of a former lover and through her close, but often stormy,
friendship with Bibi, a cook who dreams of becoming an animal behaviourist. Play. Gillian Plowman A black comedy, the play explores the relationships between two
'odd' couples thrown prematurely out of hospital care. Firstly, we
see two men conduct fantasy interviews for jobs they will never get,
then two women trying to 'make plans' as urged to do by the hospital.
They all meet when Oz throws a disastrous party with the four desperately
attempting the niceties of social intercourse. Comedy. Charles Horine. 3 men, 3 women. Interior. The plot concerns Paul Carter, an architect doomed by an unkind
fate to design only bathrooms; his wife, Alice, who starts out disgustingly
normal; and their son, Roger, a 'hep' college student. Roger gets
into a fracas and his mother sends him to a psychiatrist, who is
also a friend of the family. Things start from there. Friend psychiatrist
finds Roger OK, with the parents at fault because of their excessive
normality. So hubby, who has a trick knee, which is an integral part
of the plot, decides to 'live it up' while the wife is away. His
knee goes awry in Schrafft's bar and he is helped by Lela, a Greenwich
Village beatnik who is a wild, uninhibited girl when sober, but a
high-minded-lady when in her cups. Lela gets him safely home and
at an embarrassing moment the wife returns and, of course thinks
the worst. So she orders hubby out of the house and proceeds to some
high living of her own. The usual complications ensue, but everyone
winds up in his or her proper place at the final curtain. The dialogue
sparkles with witty repartee and no one in the cast has been neglected
when it comes to funny lines and involvement in ludicrous situations. Comedy/Drama. Walt Anderson. 8 men, 6 women, 1 boy, 2 girls. Unit Set "Me, Candido!" is the defiant battlecry of a homeless eleven-year-old
shoeshine boy, who is unofficially adopted by Papa Gomez, a poor
Puerto Rican with a large family recently arrived in New York; by
truculent old Mr. Ramirez, proprietor of a restaurant locally known
as "The Garbage Pail"; by Mike McGinty, an eloquent and thirsty ex-longshoreman;
and by Yetta Rosenbloom, a lonely old woman whose family has drifted
away from her. But the simple, kindly act of taking a boy in from
the street comes up against the red-tape of officialdom. Candido
can't work in
"The Garbage Pail"; he must go to school; he can't go to school until
he has been legally adopted. They need a lawyer - for free, money
is for rice and beans. But Candido is a boy, not a case history,
and his fathers are determined to keep him out of an institution.
The law does not concern itself with love. But the neighbours do,
and the struggle spreads to the entire neighbourhood. Candido becomes
a cause célèbre. Amid humorous entanglements, the situation
is at last resolved in a poignant and moving scene in the courtroom. A play by Euripides, translated by Alistair Elliot Medea finds herself wronged by her husband Jason when he marries the King's daughter. She is banished by the King, Creon, but, fatally, he gives her one day to prepare for her departure; 'one day,' he says, 'is too short a time to do us harm.' Racked with grief and anger and hatred, Medea undertakes horrendous acts of revenge that see the death of Jason's new wife, and, most brutally, of her own children. Euripides. Trans F. Raphael & K.McLeish The powerful myth of Medea, who murders her children to revenge
her husband's infidelity - in a translation first performed at the
Royal Exchange, Manchester in 1992. Original first performed in 431
BC. Drama. Carson McCullers. 6 men, 7 women. Unit Set This report of a harum-scarum adolescent girl in Georgia is wonderfully
- almost painfully - perceptive. The associated sketches of a Negro
mammy and a busy little boy are masterly pieces of writing. According
to the Journal-American, "Something rare and special." John
Mason Brown wrote: "(This) study of the loneliness of an over
imaginative young Georgian girl is no ordinary play. It is felt,
observed and phrased with exceptional sensitivity. It deals with
the torturing dreams, the hungry egotism, and the heartbreak of childhood
in a manner as rare as it is welcome ...plainly, it is the work of
an artist." Play. Václav Havel. Translated by Vera Blackwell Written and performed during Czechoslovakia's era of relative political freedom in the 1960s, this is a provocative and witty assault on the madness of 'efficiency' peculiar to total bureaucracy. The action takes place in a model political bureaucracy where a harassed manager introduces a new jargon designed to supplant the popular language and expedite regimentation, but which proves to be unworkable. Long one-act Play. Arthur Miller. 12 men, 2 women. Interior. This is the shorter of two plays which were produced on Broadway
under the generic title of A View From the Bridge - a one-act
fragment about people who work in an automobile parts warehouse in
the early Roosevelt days. Properly speaking, it has no plot - yet
something does happen to almost everybody. A youth gets a chance
to go to college. A drunk reforms. Another drunk rebels. A young
man with a song in his soul finds himself forgetting the song as
poverty and a lack of opportunity grind him down. Shelagh Stevenson. 2 men, 4 women. Unit set A touching and hugely entertaining comedy provides an insight into
the lives of three sisters who are reunited for their mother's funeral.
A neurotic maternal type, a paranoid doctor and a brattish youngest
sibling recall their childhood, but find that personal grievances
have coloured their memories, which differ greatly and cause immense
friction. Play. Fria Lamont Stewart Written for Glasgow Unity in 1947, this extraordinarily moving play of women surviving in the east end of Glasgow of the 1930s was revived by 7:84 Company to tremendous critical acclaim. It finds in the lives of Maggie, her family and her neighbours not only all the tragedy that appalling housing, massive unemployment and grinding poverty can produce, but also a rich vein of comedy - the sense of the ridiculous, the need for a good laugh. Drama. Joe Pintauro. Adapted from the Peter Matthiessen book of
the same name. The play chronicles the fate of a fishing family on the East End
of Long Island. Walt, father of the family, is a quiet and decent
man who senses he may be the last of his line to make a living from
the sea. Alice, his wife, is cut from the same cloth, giving all
her strength and love of the sea to her men. Lee, their oldest son,
is full of anger, realising that the fishing life is virtually finished
and that he is too old to learn a new trade. William, the youngest
son, is bright, happy, and stubbornly in love with the sea. Peter,
a writer living in East Hampton and trying to make a living working
the sea, serves as the narrator of the play as well as a friend of
the family. The baymen, he tells us, have been making a good living
fishing off the coast of the island for three hundred years. Over
the last few decades, however, their already hard life has become
tougher, as pollution, over fishing and downturns in the natural
life cycles of the fish have led to ever diminishing catches. The
strain on their lives is more acute with the growing population of
affluent urbanites who see the East End as their weekend and summer
playground. The baymen are determined to persevere despite financial
troubles and loss of life, but the nail in the coffin comes as the
baymen's last dependable method of catching saleable fish, a technique
called haul-seining - which the Indians had taught to the baymen's
ancestors - is outlawed by the NY State government. While claiming
to protect the Striped Bass from over fishing, the government is
really responding to pressure from the powerful sportsfisherman's
lobby. The family is unable to survive this blow. Walt dies soon
after, as if his heart had broken. Lee drowns in a boating accident,
and, after Alice's death, William ends up mowing the lawns of the
rich urbanites' weekend homes. All that remains of the family are
the details which Peter captured in his journal as part of a promise
to them to try and save their way of life. Comedy. D.B. Gilles. 3 men. Interior Every Tuesday night, Rob, an advertising executive in his late twenties,
gets together with either Larry, a salesman in his mid-thirties,
or Kurt, a psychiatrist in his early thirties, for a tennis match.
Rob yearns for marriage, but is in love with a woman who has been
offered a job in Los Angeles and wants him to pull up stakes. Larry,
a self-confessed male chauvinist, has tired of his marriage to a
high school sweetheart and believes there's nothing a
"bachelor pad" wouldn't solve. Kurt is gay and, after two live-in
lovers and countless one night stands, is attempting his first relationship
with a woman, in hopes of finding stability at last. By the end of
the play, Rob has decided to put his career ahead of marriage; Larry
has had second thoughts about a breakup with his wife; and Kurt,
reconciled to his fate, is hoping for a date with the guy who has
the court after them. Having helped one another through the pitfalls
of women, jobs, and just staying alive, the three have come to recognize
the true nature of friendship and the audience has come to know,
and care about, three unique human beings who, at last, might just
be on the verge of discovering the sense of direction and maturity
which has previously eluded them. Laura Cahill 2 men, 2 women. Interior On Manhattan's Upper West Side, Sarah decides to brighten her spirits,
and those of her friend Isobel, by throwing an impromptu dinner party.
Sarah invites Bo, a wanna-be singer who, to the dismay of Isobel,
invites Stu, Isobel's ex-boyfriend. Isobel is deeply depressed over
the break-up. She can barely look at Stu when he arrives, but fighting
through tears she seeks only understanding and compassion from him.
Feeling betrayed, Isobel has no other option but to wrestle her demons
while feigning cordiality and contentment in the face of Sarah and
Bo. Soon, the dinner party develops into an awkward facade of lost
souls whose failure. to communicate and find happiness has left them
pitiful, hopelessly lonely and at the mercy of others. Comedy. John van Druten. 9 men, 5 women (several of the men are bits). Exterior. A delicate and amusing adult comedy about a playwright with whom
a young woman falls in love. the young woman believes that his rather
easy philosophy of life, as outlined in one of his plays, is actually
the philosophy by which he lives. Because the playwright is a scrupulous
and understanding fellow, he disabuses the young woman, without disillusioning
her. Play. Martin Sherman Messiah is set in Poland in 1665 following the Cossack uprising in which over a third of the once thriving Jewish community has been slaughtered, the rest impoverished. Now everyone is obsessed with the certainty that the Messiah will come. So, with the news that the Messiah is preaching in the Middle East, Rachel and her family journey to Gallipoli with tragic results. ' ... handles the Jewish dilemma with humanity and humour.' Standard |