About the Play:

Blind Date has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Female/Female Scenes.

The Actor has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Male Monologues and Female/Male Scenes.

The volume Blind Date and The Actor contains two one-act comedies by Horton Foote. In Blind Date a well-meaning aunt tries to arrange the social life of her overwhelmingly reluctant niece, with hilariously unexpected results. And a young man's determination to launch a career on the stage collides with his family's practical wishes in The Actor, one of Horton Foote's most affecting explorations of the family dynamic.

Blind Date is a touching and funny study of what happens when a fluttery, well-meaning aunt tries to arrange a date for her visiting (and uncooperative) niece. The setting is the living room of Robert and Dolores Henry's home in Harrison, Texas, right on the edge of the Depression in 1928. Dolores, once a high-school beauty queen, is now the scourge of her stoical but still devoted husband, who comes home from the office hungry and tired to find that there will be no dinner tonight. The reason is that Dolores has, at last, been able to arrange a date for her visiting niece, Sarah Nancy, and she wants Robert out of the way. But the young man, who is studying to be a mortician, goes out the window as the bookish, rebellious Sarah Nancy refuses to play the flirtation game and, instead, makes it abundantly (and hilariously) clear that she considers Felix to be a boring oaf. Sarah Nancy's attitude delights her uncle as much as it distresses her aunt, who retires from the field with a sudden sick headache. However, the two young people, left alone by their nosy elders, find a common interest at last – and, as the curtain falls, they are contentedly, and wordlessly, poring over a stack of wonderfully corny old high-school yearbooks. (Cast: 2 female, 2 male)

The Actor tells the hilarious and moving story of high school senior who wants to go to acting school. But in 1932, during the heart of the Great Depression, his parents worry that sending his son to acting school would be a waste of their limited funds. They want him to receive a college education and find a stable job. Faced with conflicting expectations, he must defend his choice not only to his family, but to his friends and his hometown in Texas. It's a charming exploration of artistic ambition from one of modern theatre's greatest artists. (Cast: 2 female, 3 male, several small parts)

Blind Date was first presented in 1986 as part of the One-Act Marathon at The Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York City.

What people say:

"Foote writes with intelligence, sensitivity, humor, and compassion. Blind Date, understatedly funny and uninsistently touching, is full of lived humanity." — New York Magazine

"Besides being very funny, Blind Date has a bit to say about how oppressive sexual roles can be passed down from generation to generation … Few dramatists today can replicate this kind of storytelling with the gentle mastery that Mr. Foote provides … both sentimental and ruthless, toting up the losses in one generation's life with warm compassion and a cold awareness that to live is ultimately to lose." — New York Times

About the Playwright:

Horton Foote (1916-2009) was a prolific American playwright and screenwriter with an ear for the resilient spirit of daily life in the small-town southern US states. Known as a writer's writer, he switched readily from the stage to television and film. He received Academy Awards for his screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird and his original screenplay Tender Mercies. During the Golden Age of television, he authored numerous notable live television dramas. For his 1997 television adaptation of William Faulkner's "Old Man," he won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing of a Miniseries. He received the 1995 Pulitzer Prize and his first Tony nomination for his play, The Young Man From Atlanta.