Composers and their stage works 



 

A Lovely Sunday fior Creve Coeur

Play. Tennessee Williams. 4 women. Interior

The time is 1935, the place St. Louis, where Dorothea, a youngish high school teacher, rooms with Bodey, a plain but kind-hearted German-American spinster. Hopelessly romantic, Dorothea dreams of marriage with her sometime beau, the principal of the school, and Bodey, in an attempt to spare her feelings, hides the morning newspaper, which carries a notice of the principal's engagement to another. Bodey also hopes to make a match between Dorothea and her fat, cigarsmoking brother, and tries to persuade Dorothea to join them for a picnic at Creve Coeur, a nearby amusement park. Their departure is delayed by the arrival of Helena, a snobbish, tart-tongued art teacher, who wants Dorothea to share an apartment with her in a better part of town. Inevitably, a struggle evolves between Bodey and Helena, with Dorothea, lost in her dream world, caught between them. In the end reality shatters Dorothea's fond hopes, and brings her rudely back to earth - but not without dear evidence that, somehow, she will find the strength to recover and go on.
ISBN: 0-8112-0757-9

Lovers

Double-bill. Brian Friel
M3 or 2 (17, 50) F5 or 4 (17, 40, 60). Adaptable setting.

The first play, Winners, tells the story of Mag and Joe. Young and in love, they spend a glorious summer's day laughing and talking together and planning their future. But for Mag and Joe there is to be no future. The second play, Losers, tells of Hanna and Andy, a couple to whom love has come late, and for whom courting is made almost impossible by the upstairs presence of Hanna's demanding invalid mother. They do eventually get married, but gradually Andy realises that Hanna is bidding fair to becoming a replica of her mother.

Lovers Dancing

Play. Charles Dyer
M2 (middle-age) F2 (middle-age). A sitting-room/hall.

Presented at London's Albery Theatre with Paul Eddington, Colin Blakely, Jane Carr and Georgina Hale, this play tells the story of George, Alicia, Albert and Cheryl who nineteen years previously drunkenly shared the same bed and where Cheryl conceived a son whose paternity was decided by the toss of a coin. Here they are now for the annual celebration of the Night of the Dreadful Bed anniversary and as ever the bitter recriminations and resentments begin.
ISBN 0 573 11265 7

The Loves of Cass McGuire

Play. Brian Friel
M4 (17, 60s, elderly, 70) F6 (18, 50, 70s, 89). A spacious room

For more than fifty years Cass McGuire has worked a block from Skid Row, among deadbeats and washouts - people who live in the past. This bawdy, vital, compassionate play deals with her return to Ireland and her genteel family's rejection of her. It follows her lonely struggle to rediscover the home she's dreamt of all her life and her eventual surrender to the make-believe of Eden House, rest home for elderly people.

A Lovesong For Miss Lydia

Comedy Don Evans. 2 men, 2 women. Interior

Lydia Frazier, a widow in her seventies and a pillar of her church, is living out her life with quiet dignity in her modest Philadelphia home. Her circumstances change,, however, when, for reasons of loneliness (and a little extra income), she decides to take in a boarder. Her roomer turns out to be the charming, and apparently unscrupulous Mahlon, who loses no time in working his wiles on his trusting, vulnerable landlady, despite the cautious warnings of her well meaning, suspicious friends, Sarah and Ostell. And, for a time, it does appear that the suave, scheming Mahlon has bamboozled Miss Lydia into a course of action which will surely end in disenchantment and loss. But despite a series of sometimes funny, sometimes tense, confrontations, the sage and goodhearted old lady eventually proves that charity and understanding are more than a match for either duplicity or unfeeling prejudice and, as the play ends, it does indeed become a "lovesong" for its very remarkable and indomitable protagonist.
ISBN: 0-8222-0700-1

Low In the Dark

(in The Crack in the Emerald). Marina Carr
2m 3f Drama. Single interior set.

A mother and daughter bicker over who has just given birth; a couple discuss building walls and baking buns in the oven; and a man gets pregnant This witty, absurdist play by one of Ireland's leading women playwrights dismantles the myths of motherhood and exposes the sexism of language and religious imagery.
ISBN 1854592378

Low Level Panic

Play. Clare McIntyre
F3 (20s)

Presented by the Women's Playhouse Trust at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1988 and the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith in 1989, this is a careful examination of the role of pornography in our society and the way it affects three young women in particular, using short scenes to show how popular images of women influence the way they are seen by others and the way they see themselves.

Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander

Comedy/ Drama. Preston Jones.

The place is Bradleyville, a small town in West Texas, where Lu Ann Hampton, seventeen and a high school cheerleader, dreams of far-off places, but settles for marriage with a friend of her

Korean War veteran brother. In the following act, ten years later, now divorced and working as a "beauty technician," Lu Ann meets and marries Corky Oberlander, only to lose him in a fatal auto accident. Then, a decade later again, we find Lu Ann still in Bradleyville, with her teenaged daughter, her now alcoholic brother, and a mother who has been enfeebled by a stroke. In a moving scene she is visited by her high school sweetheart, who has become a successful preacher, and as they review the past it becomes eloquently clear that Lu Anns life has come full circle - with her hopes and dreams sacrificed to the realities of everyday life, and with only her resolute spirit to sustain her towards the inevitable grayness of the future. 8 men, 3 women. 2 Interiors. ISBN. 0-8222-0705-2

Lucky Sods

Play. John Godber
M4 (30s, 40s) F4 (30s, 40s, 70s) can be played by M2 F2. Various simple interiors and exteriors.

When Morris and Jean win the National Lottery-to the tune of two million pounds -they can't believe their luck. But the cracks in their marriage widen, their past catches up with them and their relatives become increasingly resentful. Jean keeps winning and Morris takes off to Amsterdam, with an old flame, but will his prophecy that bad luck always follows good turn out to be true?
ISBN 0 573 01825 1

The Lucky Spot

Comedy. Beth Henley. 4 men, 3 women. Interior

The place is Pigeon, Louisiana, the time Christmas 1934 - at the low point of the American Depression. Reed Hooker, a compulsive gambler, has won a run-down rural dance hall in a poker game, and hopes that it will make his fortune. Assisted by the faithful Turnip and an underaged waif named Cassidy (whom Reed also won at cards and whom he has made pregnant) Reed has christened the place "The Lucky Spot" and is preparing for the grand opening. Cassidy, hoping that Reed will divorce his present spouse and marry her, has secretly arranged for his estranged wife, Sue Jack, to have Christmas parole from the prison where she was committed for doing away with Reed's last ladylove. But as Sue Jack and Reed detest each other (or think that they do) her unexpected arrival starts the fur flying - particularly after the volatile Sue Jack, who is supposed to stay on the wagon, comes across both a loaded pistol and a jar of good southern moonshine. Complications multiply (except for the rather forlorn, weak-ankled Lacey), and the sinister Whitt Carmichael (to whom Reed owes money) turns up with a dispossess order. In the end The Lucky Spot proves not to be so lucky, but Reed and Sue Jack do discover that what they think is hate is really love - and the others, in one very funny way or another, also get their just desserts.
ISBN: 0-8222-0706-0