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Three One-Act Plays
Author(s):
Jason Miller
THE STORIES: IT'S A SIN TO TELL A LIE. Two people, an old man and an old woman, meet in their doctor's waiting room. They begin a casual conversation, and he is soon revealed as a would-be poet, and she as a dreamer who fancies that she has had much more in life than is actually the case. But, as they tell ever more outrageous fibs to each other, the deeper truth of their essential loneliness emerges--and in a very touching way they "find" each other, and the friendship and concern of another human being which they both need so desperately. (1M, 1W). CIRCUS LADY. The "Circus Lady" of the title is a grossly fat, slatternly woman who has been reduced to living in squalor, and on welfare while beset with fears that the rapist-killer who has terrorized the area is coming for her next. Her son, fed up with their slovenly existence, is about to go off to join a government training program; the welfare investigator wants to move her to a furnished room and arrange for psychiatric treatment; and her sister refuses to take her into her own home. Ultimately she confesses to her son that his father did not desert them as she had always claimed but, instead, had committed suicide--and for the same reasons that others are now abandoning her. In the end she is alone, resigned to her fate, and tragically aware that this is of her own inevitable making. (3M, 2W). LOU GEHRIG DID NOT DIE OF CANCERVictor Spinelli, a frustrated athlete who now works for his domineering father, finds his greatest satisfaction in coaching a little league baseball team. He is given to bluster, but beneath this he is both sensitive and touchingly vulnerable. His relationship with his wife, who is preoccupied with acting in amateur theatre, is growing cool, but he finds a kindred spirit in the mother of one of his team members, an abandoned wife who comes by to ask that Victor show more concern for her bench-warmer son. She stays for a drink and gradually, as confidences are exchanged, we sense that out of the bitterness and failure which both have known a new and promising liaison is forming for them both. (1M, 2W).
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| Genre(s): | Not Available | | Time Period(s): | Not Available | | Play Type: | Play | | Runtime: | Not Available | | Acts: | Not Available | | Set Complexity: | Not Available | | Set Information: | Not Available | | Year First Published: | Not Available | | Total Characters: | Not Available | | Male Characters: | 0 | | Female Characters: | 0 | | Androgynous Characters: | Not Available | | Minimum Cast: | Not Available | | Maximum Cast: | Not Available | | Cost: | FEE: $50 per performance when produced together; $25 each for LOU GEHRIG DID NOT DIE OF CANCER and CIRCUS LADY; $20 for IT'S A SIN TO TELL A LIE when produced individually
Royalty/cost information prone to change.
Please check with the publisher for the most accurate information. | | Publisher: | Dramatists Play Service
Click on the publisher's name above for additional information, including updated prices. | | ISBN: | Not Available |
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