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Play. Joe Pintauro. Atop the arctic world, pilgrim members of a Detroit family huddle
around a giant soup pot filled with nothing but melting ice and a
gauze-wrapped raccoon head. The starving family awaits the return
of Vince, the eldest, who has promised food from the company store
where he works. Charlie, the next oldest, is mentally slow but he
is the kindest, tending the soup which is barely saving their lives.
Julie, a vegetarian, is the most distressed. Little Chrissie wants
her mother. Klute, the middle son, has stolen and hoarded what little
food remained. The children have tied up Pop who is distraught over
his wife's death and his layoff by the auto industry. Though deceased,
Mom shows up in a yellow pinafore with fabulous food for breakfast
but she is forced to leave when the children convince her she is
only a hunger hallucination. Vince arrives all wet, after having
lost the whole supply of food in a stream so polluted that the water
couldn't freeze. Later that night, Pop steals away with Charlie and
they return with a beautiful reindeer that Pop killed with his pickup
truck. They dress the animal, store its parts and throw the rump
in the soup. Just when the soup is ready, Iona, an Eskimotype woman
appears with a helicopter escort and a blue blizzard lamp, like a
big blue star, to help the helicopter track her movements. She is
searching for Norman, her pet reindeer who somehow became lost in
the blizzard. As she is about to sip the hot soup to warm herself,
Chrissie blurts out that Norman is in the soup. Iona is seriously
shaken but recovers enough to forgive them, recalling how loyal and
tender a reindeer Norman was. Seeing how weak Julie is, Iona convinces
her eat some soup, then takes half of the family in the helicopter
to her commune colony under the ice, leaving the blue blizzard light
out on the tundra so the helicopter can find its way back for the
rest of them. Pop, Chrissie and Charlie put on their coats and sit
at the open barn door, guarding the blue fight so it will not disappear,
hoping that Iona will remain real and not become another maternal
hallucination. Play. Trevor Cowper A business partner recommends to George, a successful and overworked
architect, a therapeutic affair to take his mind off all his pressures.
Along comes Gina, beautiful, clever and, on the face of it, aggressively
feminist, to fill this prescription. But this play is no average
knockabout farce: the complications that ensue raise thought-provoking
questions on the easy assumptions we tend to make about modern manners. Light comedy. Noel Coward Moxie is maid to Felicity, Countess of Marshwood. When Felicity's
son Nigel announces his engagement to Miranda Frayle, the film star,
Moxie is distressed as Miranda is really her sister, who ignored
her family after becoming famous. Miranda starts describing the home
from which she ran away, saying her sister drank and she had to care
for her mother. Outraged, Moxie blurts out the truth - and the engagement
becomes rather strained. Comedy. Alan Ayckbourn Greg and Ginny are living together, but Greg is becoming somewhat
suspicious that he is not the only man in her life. He wonders about
Ginny's plan 'to visit her parents' and decides to follow her. Ginny
is really going to see a considerably older lover, but only in order
to break with him. Greg mistakes the ex-lover and his wife for Ginny's
parents. Ginny's arrival further compounds an already wildly hilarious
situation. Comedy. William Douglas Home Jane is totally uninterested in her mother's valiant efforts to
give her a successful 'season', and much prefers the company of horses
to that of the chinless drips who are assigned to her as escorts.
When she does fall in love with a man, it is with one who seems to
her parents to be most unsuitable. However, he turns out to be much
more acceptable than they had thought - he even has a title - so
everybody is happy. Colin Morris : Farce A deferred public schoolboy, a deferred married man from Lancashire
and a cockney lad all report to the army for National Service. This
lively comedy deals with this ill-assorted bunch of conscripts who
get themselves in and out of all sorts of adventures. Great barrack-room
humour in a hilarious caricature of military life. The Reluctant Rogue (or Mother's Day) Comedy. John Patrick. Reed Dolan would seem to be living in the best of all possible worlds:
he is young, attractive and a professor of drama at a small college
teeming with toothsome co-eds anxious for good grades. Reed's specialty
is inviting his better-looking students to his apartment to discuss
their term papers, after which, it all goes well. The next step is
a weekend at his hideaway on nearby Lake Hocapocapoo. The problem
is that his amorous exploits are too successful as, much to his consternation,
not one but three lovesick co-eds descend on him in succession one
afternoon - with Reed then struggling hilariously to keep each from
discovering the presence of the others. And in (a) the unexpected
arrival of an irate father who intends to shoot his daughter's seducer,
and (b) the sudden reappearance of a former student who brings along
her young son claiming that Reed is the father, and the stage is
set for the wildly funny finale - with Reed's desperately devious
(and hilarious) alibis growing ever more outrageous as he attempts
to side-step what, for a less resourceful liar, would be pure and
inescapable disaster. Play Stephen Poliakoff Stephen Poliakoff's provocative new play for the Royal National
Theatre is the story of the intense rivalry between the generations
in a world which seems to record everything and remember nothing
as it hurtles into the next century. Rick, a middle-aged man at a
crossroads in his life, stumbles on a disturbing technological mystery
which threatens to replace his reality with an imagined, recorded
version of his life on videotape. Play. Graham Reid Bert and Theresa, both mourning sons, meet in the cemetery and fall
in love. Their blossoming relationship is complicated by the fact
that he is a Protestant and she a Catholic ... and this is Belfast.
Bert's son, who believes his father would rather have lost him than
his adored brother, and Theresa's daughters, one of whom is married
to an imprisoned IRA gunman, oppose the romance from the start, but
Bert's daughter-in-law, herself trapped in an unhappy marriage, supports
the elderly lovers. |