Composers and their stage works 



 

Subfertile

Play. Tom Mardirosian.
2 men, 3 women. Unit Set.

There is no room for delicacy or modesty when Tom, on the brink of his fortieth birthday, learns that he and his wife's childless condition is a result of his low sperm count. Determined to have a child, and haunted by the dinosaurs he visits at the Museum of Natural History, Tom pursues the dream of fatherhood through the expensive and painful avenues of modern medicine. The situation is hard on his masculinity and his marriage, and the solutions become increasingly bizarre. Should Tom opt for surgery, insulated diapers, or the good, old-fashioned remedy offered by his best friend who is perfectly capable and willing to impregnate Tom's wife? The play, narrated by the character of Tom, is never self-pitying and always humorous. It treats a very modern human dilemma with wit and compassion.
ISBN: 0-8222-1092-4

Suburb of Babylon.

Three inter-linked plays. Hugh Leonard

Cast as below. Composite setting: a hall and a living-room. (The basic set remains the same in each play with perhaps a few modifications in the third.)

A Time of Wolves and Tigers
M1(40s). M1 or Fl voice only
Jumbo, an alcoholic civil servant, returns home half-drunk. His wife has left him and Jumbo is afraid of the empty house. Seeking reassurance he starts phoning friends, only to discover that he is in trouble at work. Feeling isolated, he manages to contact his wife and persuades her to return home, promising to mend his ways. But Jumbo knows he can never change and the play ends with him trying to come to grips with his fear of his empty house and life.  

Nothing Personal
M2 (30s, 40) F1 (30s) 
Garrulous suburbanite Phil is taken by Pat, whom he has just met in a pub, to No. 19, the home of Betty, whose husband is interned in the North. Initially, the atmosphere is jovial as they await a fourth member of the party, but it becomes increasingly sinister and Phil realizes he has been kidnapped. He must await the fourth member - and execution.

The Last of the Last of the Mohicans
M3 (40, middle-age) F2 (30s, middle-age). M 1 or Fl voice only
 
In the final play the mood changes to one of hilarious comedy as Dominick, having packed his wife off on retreat to an obscure saint's shrine, is poised to enjoy an adulterous affair with sexy Grace. Grace arrives, followed by Dominick's wife, followed by Grace's husband -a formidable Aer Lingus pilot. Eventually the evening is resolved amicably although not quite how Dominick intended!

ISBN 0 573 11426 9

Suburbia

Drama. Eric Bogosian. Music by Eric Bogosian.
5 men, 4 women. Exterior.

The parking lot of a mini-mall convenience store is the private domain of three men in their very early twenties: Jeff, Buff and Tim. Jeff is a sometime student, Buff an easy-going party animal, and Tim a virtual alcoholic Air Force veteran. They talk trash, harass Nazeer, the Pakistani owner of the store, and revel in their high school glory days. They drink beer, get high and eat Oreos. Jeff ponders his problematic relationship with his artist girlfriend, Sooze, and Buff fantasises a relationship with Sooze's best friend, Bee-Bee, a nurses' aide on the critical ward of the local hospital. The focal point of this evening is the arrival of an old high school chum, Pony, and his female associate, Erica. Since Pony left Burnfield (the name of this fictional suburban town), he has gone on to become semi-famous fronting for a band that has an album on the charts and a video on MTV. In the course of the evening, all of the friends congregate in the parking lot. Once Pony arrives in his black limo, fascination with his success turns into jealousy, then flowers into bitter anger. New liaisons evolve as Buff succeeds in wooing Bee-Bee, Tim discovers his splenetic misanthropy is a turn-on for Erica and Pony turns Sooze's restlessness to his advantage. The building tension between the friends is accentuated with absurd physical moments and sheer violence: Sooze performs her piece for the group, Tim beats up Nazeer and Buff gives new definition to the term "wrecked." As the next day dawns, some of the group have found their way out of Burnfield while the rest are left to deal with a tragedy that could have been any of them.
ISBN: 0-8222-1428-8

Successful Strategies.

A translation of Marivaux's L'Heureux Stratageme by Timberlake Wertenbaker
M5 F3. Exterior settings.

A rich, rose-decked Comtesse, turning infidelity into a style, whimsically abandons her lover, Dorante. Instead she takes up with the posturing Chevalier. And, in order to get her revenge, the latter's lover, the Marquise, forms an amorous alliance with Dorante. The surface of wit, elegance and good manners never ceases to shimmer but, beneath it, we are aware of genuine passion, suffering and bewilderment. Running time approximately 90 minutes. Period 1733

Sucking Dublin

(in Disco Pigs) - Endo Walsh
2m 3f. Short drama. Simple set.

By the author of Disco Pigs, this is a fierce and uncompromising account of a group of five individuals tormented by a rape in a claustrophobic, drug-infested Dublin. Premiered by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 1997.
ISBN 1 85459 398 6

The Sudden and Accidental Re-education of Horse Johnson

Comedy. Douglas Taylor.
4 men, 2 women. Interior.

Lacking formal education, Horse Johnson makes his living by working in a warehouse. But Horse's imagination has been ignited by a free-spirited, dynamic, genius-type vagabond named Clint, who roams the West picking apples while spouting poetry, philosophy and (or so it seems to Horse) answers to the deeper questions of life. Taking a leave from his job, Horse has closeted himself with Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and the like, looking for the key to it all - and straining his long-suffering wife's patience to the breaking point. But the cosmic answers are slow in coming, and Horse is beginning to falter (much to his family's relief) when Clint himself bursts on the scene, sweeping all doubts away with a dazzling display of high-sounding philosophic doubletalk. For Horse it seems now that the meaning of it all must be near at hand, but it is quickly evident that Clint's thoughts are more on Horse's attractive (and engaged) sister-in-law than Horse's mind. Which results in some tense, not to mention disenchanting, moments for our hero. As the play ends Horse is still looking for the "answers," but the search is now within the context of his own life and limitations - and there is the happy suggestion that he may, be on the right tract at last.
ISBN: 0-8222-1093-2

Suddenly at Home

Play. Francis Durbridge
M4 (30s-50s) F4 (20s, 30s). A living-room.

When Glenn Howard decided to get rid of his wealthy wife he worked out a complicated but seemingly foolproof plan which would not only keep him in the clear but involve his wife's former lover, detective-story writer Sam Blaine. The plan, however, depends on the co-operation of another person, Sheila Wallis, and with the unexpected arrival on the scene of the formidable Remick, things begin to fall apart.
ISBN 0 573 01452 3

Suddenly Last Summer

Drama. Tennessee Williams.
2 men, 5 women. Exterior

'This is a true story about the time and the world we live in.' Williams has made it seem true - or at least curiously and suspensefully possible - by the extraordinary skill with which he wrings detail after detail out of a young woman who has lived with horror. Anne Meacham, as a girl who has been the sole witness to her cousin's unbelievably shocking death, is brought into a 'planned jungle' of a New Orleans garden to confront a family that is intensely interested in having her deny the lurid tale she has told. The post-dilettante's mother is, indeed, so ruthlessly eager to suppress the facts that she had the girl incarcerated in a mental institution and she is perfectly willing, once she finishes her ritualistic five o'clock frozen daiquiri, to order the performance of a frontal lobotomy. A nun stands in rigid attendance; a doctor prepares a hypodermic to force the truth; greedy relatives beg her to recant in return for solid cash. Under the assorted, and thoroughly fascinating, pressures that are brought to bear, and under the intolerable, stammering strain of reliving her own memories, Miss Meacham slowly, painfully, hypnotically paints a concrete and blistering portrait of loneliness ... of the sudden snapping of that spider's web that is one man's life, of ultimate panic and futile flight. The very reluctance with which the grim, hopeless narrative is unfolded binds us to it; Mr. Williams threads it out with a spare, sure, sharply vivid control of language.
ISBN: 0-8222-1094-0

Sufficient Carbohydrate

Play. Dennis Potter
M3 (16, 30s, 40s) F2 (30s). A living-room and terrace of a Greek villa.

From the start the holiday seems doomed to failure: two senior executives, at daggers drawn over company policy, are holidaying together in a Greek villa with their families ... This play is a masterpiece of stage-craft and human perception. The crisis in the play rests on a bitter conflict of wills between two men, and yet there are episodes of humour, when the play is jolted from its expected track.

The Suicide

Satirical comedy. Nikolai Erdman, translated by Peter Tegel
M 11 F5. Extras. Various interior and exterior settings.

A brilliant and penetrating satirical comedy about an unemployed `little man' who contemplates suicide and is besieged by spokespeople of discontented groups, from butchers to intellectuals, who want him to turn his suicide into a gesture on their behalf. As one of the characters says, `Nowadays only the dead may say what the living think.'