About the Play:

Beautiful Child has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Male Monologues.

Beautiful Child is a full-length drama by Nicky Silver. Family. Is. Everything. How do we love someone who falls outside our moral code? A cynically married couple is drawn together when their 30-year-old son, a troubled teacher, comes back home to tell them that he has fallen in love – with his 8-year-old student.

Beautiful Child presents Harry and Nan, a couple whose marriage has become a comfortable battleground of witty barbs and infidelity. Everything they think they know, however, is called into question when their son, Isaac, an art teacher and painter, comes for lunch and asks if he can stay. The world's no longer safe for Isaac, as his secrets are about to become public. He has fallen in love, and has been having an affair, with one of his students, an eight-year-old boy named Brian. Harry and Nan search for clues, desperate to make sense of this horror, alternately looking for exoneration and punishment for what must be their fault. They want to help their son, who was, as Harry ruefully recalls, a beautiful child. They want to love him. But how? And what is their responsibility to the world and to the children in Isaac's future? Magically, this tragedy brings Harry and Nan closer together as they arrive at a decision that's terribly painful and magically restorative.

Beautiful Child premiered in 2002 at the Vineyard Theatre off-Broadway in New York City. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been performed in regional and college theatre productions.

Cast: 3 female, 2 male

What people say:

"A decade after he captured critical attention with Pterodactyls, Mr. Silver continues to shape sentences that have the vibrant, poisoned lusciousness of a John Currin painting." — New York Times

"Beautiful Child is compelling … darkly demented, blazingly articulate and cheerfully outrageous … The return of Nicky Silver's voice is a pleasure." — New York Newsday

"Superb … Beautiful Child exudes a compelling fascination…." — Associated Press

"An intelligent and engaging drama." — Time Out

About the Playwright:

Nicky Silver is an award-winning American playwright. He exploded onto the American theatre scene in October of 1993, with the off-Broadway opening of his play Pterodactyls (Oppenheimer Award, Kesselring Award, Drama Desk nomination, Outer Critic's Circle nomination). His plays have been produced extensively in New York City as well as across Europe and as far away as South Korea.