Play. Tom Mardirosian. 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. 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.)
Drama. Eric Bogosian. Music by Eric Bogosian. 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. A translation of Marivaux's L'Heureux Stratageme by Timberlake
Wertenbaker 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 (in Disco Pigs) - Endo Walsh 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. The Sudden and Accidental Re-education of Horse Johnson Comedy. Douglas Taylor. 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. Play. Francis Durbridge 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. Drama. Tennessee Williams. '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. Play. Dennis Potter 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. Satirical comedy. Nikolai Erdman, translated by Peter Tegel 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.' |