LAUGH

03/11/15 - 04/19/15

 

WRITTEN BY BETH HENLEY
ORIGINAL MUSIC BY WAYNE BARKER
DIRECTED BY DAVID SCHWEIZER

WORLD PREMIERE

 

This world-premiere slapstick comedy is a story of mishaps and moxie, the romance of Hollywood and ultimately a Hollywood-caliber romance. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Crimes of the Heart.

 

The West. The 1920s. Mabel’s had a hard few weeks. A dynamite accident at a gold mine has left her wealthy but orphaned, and she’s shipped off to a calculating aunt whose nephew is charged with seducing her to control Mabel’s fortune. This hapless courtship reveals a shared love of silent movies and a plan for greater things. A story of mishaps and moxie, the romance of Hollywood and ultimately a Hollywood-caliber romance. A world-premiere slapstick comedy from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Crimes of the Heart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PLAYWRIGHT PERSPECTIVE

BETH HENLEY

 

Beth Henley, one of the most acclaimed Southern writers living today, was born in 1952 in Jackson, Mississippi, the daughter of an attorney and an actress. Her hometown presented Henley with unsolvable contradictions; it was a hub of Southern hospitality, while it simultaneously promoted racism and violence. “I was around when things were about to change, but all this violence was going on in reaction to the change,” Henley recalls. Finding her environment often perplexing, Henley was struck by an African-American sense of humor that to her stems from the South’s tumultuous history. “I think there’s something interesting about the notion that the South was defeated, and in the face of defeat, humor is often the best defense for humiliation.” In 1970, she left Jackson to attend Southern Methodist University, where she wrote her first play, the one-act Am I Blue.