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Historical Play Jehette Letton and Francis Letton. This brilliant play enjoyed a huge success in London. "With unerring dramatic judgment and a verbal style as lucid as it is vigorous, the authors set before us the history of the young Elizabeth Tudor from the death of her father until the news is brought to her of her accession to the throne ... The power that knits together the dozen episodes of which the play is composed is something more than the ability to startle us or dazzle us. It is the power of dramatic creation." - The London Times. ISBN. 0-8222-1290-0 The Young Girl and the Monsoon Comedy/Drama. James Ryan. Growing up is hard to do-particularly if you are a pre-adolescent
girl in Manhattan living with a photo-journalist father reeling from
a messy divorce. Constance is a 13-year-old torn by life and stretched
between parents, struggling through those daunting rites of passage
which none of us finds easy. Things arerA all smooth-sailing for
her father, Hank, 39, who is attempting to provide an anchoi for
Constance, while. also working to get his own life into some kind
of order, especially regarding his recent serious relationship with
a younger woman, Erin, 26. If Constance has only Hank for guidance,
then Hank only has Giovanna, 38, a tempestuous colleague and genuine
friend, with whom Hank has an off and on (chiefly off) affair. This
romantic comedy turns on Hank's efforts to find enough room in his
life for both Constance and Erin, and achieve the balance and maturity
that have, so far, eluded him.
Drama. Horton Foote. In The Young Man From Atlanta, a kind of elected ignorance
has skewed the past and narrowed the future, for the Kidders, Lily
Dale and Will. The two are attempting to cope with the death of their
only son, Bill, who, unable to swim, walked into a lake in Florida
and drowned. Lily Dale takes refuge in religion. She persuades herself
that Bill's death, in spite of its circumstances, was an accident.
At the prompting of Randy, the 'Young Man ftom Atlanta', who, though
he never appears, is nonetheless the catalyst of the play's action,
believes as well that her son lived in the faith she herself professes.
Will is made of tougher stuff. He acknowledges his son's suicide
and wants none of Lily Dale's pseudo-comfort. But he has his own
illusions, a belief that a hard-working, competitive, optimistic
all-American go-getter like himself can triumph by achieving 'the
best and the biggest,' and that the best and the biggest house in
Houston, into which he has sunk his savings, can paper over the bitterness
of Bill's death. But he discovers that his job, the centre of his
life and his pride, is no longer his and that his kind of competitiveness
cannot get him the bank loans he needs to start his own business.
He discovers that his wife has not only communicated with the Young
Man, as he has forbidden her to do, but has given Randy some $50,000
to 'tide him over.' This discovery only intensifies the pain of a
previous realisation that his son gave the Young Man money also.
And he discovers the strength and endurance of his own body, which
he has trusted as he has trusted his wife, has let him down, too,
for he suffers a heart attack. This shattering of his life's facade
compels him to realise that his life's core is an illusion. His single-minded
pursuit of the American dream has left his wife not only childish
but lonely, and it has denied him his son. Will chooses not to ask
the Young Man why his son gave him the money. He does not want to
know. Will and Lily Dale are reconciled. She will teach music. He
will work at the lesser job his former boss offers him, and she will
obey him, he hopes, even though she will cling to Randy, who for
her, no matter what she now knows, is the sweet boy who comforted
her. 'Everything will be all right', Will tells his wife. He will
settle for what is merely 'all right' because the 'the best and the
biggest' is as empty as the Young Man's lies. Comedy. Clifford Goldsmith. Based on the short story Youth is
Stranger Than Fiction by Walter Brooks. The play revolves around the discovery by Burnham Wicks, a widower, that not only his own teenage son and daughter, but most of the teenage children of his friends, are comparing their parents with other parents, and not always too favourably. In a fit of exasperation, Mr. Wicks calls a meeting of fathers and mothers, among whom is an attractive widow, the mother of a teenage son. He proposes that, as a lesson to their children, they allow them to exchange parents for a period of thirty day. At first, some of the mothers view the suggestion with horror, but all are finally persuaded that some good might come of the idea. The parents draw the children's names from a hat - and what happens to Mr. Wicks (who drew the widow's son), and to the widow herself, to say nothing of most of the other parents and their proxy youngsters, is hilarious entertainment. And, as the parents decide that perhaps the experiment should never have been started, the teenagers turn the table on them, telling their parents that they like their new homes, and that they are determined to make them permanent. The parents are really thrown into panic. But eventually the parents win back their own offspring - and Mr. Wicks wins the lovely widow. |