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A Perfect Ganesh
A Perfect Ganesh
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Author: Terrence McNally Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Format: Softcover # of Pages: 97 Pub. Date: 1994 ISBN-10: 0822213796 ISBN-13: 9780822213796 Cast Size: 2 women, 2 men
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About
the Play:
A Perfect Ganesh has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Male Monologues.
A Perfect Ganesh is a full-length comedic drama by Terrence
McNally. A quest for meaning in their lives leads two middle-aged
women on a journey through India and through painful memories before
returning home – with and without answers. Considered one of
Terrence McNally's best plays, A Perfect Ganesh is an
insightful and creative blend of comedy and drama with many
enchanting characters, and a captivating plot filled with humour,
warmth and a host of surprise twists and turns.
A Perfect Ganesh follows two outwardly unremarkable, very
rich middle-aged lady friends, bored with their lives and routines
and husbands. On their journey for inner peace, the women travel to
India instead of to their more usual Caribbean vacation spots. They
have chosen India as a way of healing from the deaths of their sons.
Turning the pilgrimage tradition on its head, Margaret Civil and
Katherine Brynne throw themselves into a rousing tour of India, each
one having her own secret dreams of what the fabled land of
intoxicating opposites will do for the suffering she hides within.
Margaret, an uptight example of WASP prerogative, has just discovered
a lump in her breast but hasn't told her friend. The more theatrical
and adventurous Katharine seeks a respite from the haunting of her
son, Walter, and even thinks of kissing the leprous hordes of Bombay
to atone for the way she rejected him and maybe, she thinks,
contributed to the gay-bashing in which he died. While there, they
meet a Hindu god, Ganesha, meaning 'wisdom.' Faced with the women's
despair, who but the golden elephant-headed god could intervene?
Fluid in his power to assume any guise, at peace with all things,
Ganesha is the spiritual center around which the play spins itself,
drawing upon the tragic and the comic, the beautiful and the
deplorable, until a breathtaking release arrives for both women at
his hands.
A Perfect Ganesh premiered in 1993 off-Broadway at New
York's famed Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) and was a was a Finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize
for Drama. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been mounted by regional, college, and community
theatre productions.
Cast: 2 female, 2 male
What people say:
"…the compassion that
pervades the work, the juxtapositions of the horrible and the
ethereal and the bursts of raucous humor are highly reminiscent of
such [Tennessee] Williams dramas as The Night of the Iguana and
Suddenly Last Summer." — New York Times
"…clearly McNally's most
important work to date. It is absorbing, moving, funny and, most of
all, life-assertive, a play that defines its times while addressing
its concerns." — New York Post
About the Playwright:
Terrence McNally (1938-2020)
was an American playwright whose career has spanned six decades.
Initially active in the burgeoning
Off-Broadway theatre movement
in the 1960s, he is one of
the few playwrights of his generation to have successfully made the
transition to Broadway, and, in the process, passed from avant-garde
to mainstream acclaim. In addition to four Tony Awards for his
plays, he received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller grant,
and was a recipient of the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement
Award, the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Tony
Awards' Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre Honor. He is considered
one of America's great playwrights.
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Joe Pintauro, Lanford Wilson & Terrence McNally
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