About the Play:

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

Blue Window is a full-length dramatic comedy by Craig Lucas. When a group of self-absorbed young professionals converge at a Sunday-evening dinner party, their conversational bravado gradually reveals a shared sense of loneliness in an increasingly crowded world.

Blue Window follows the events occurring before, during and after a dinner party one night in 1990s Manhattan. Libby, for her own secret reasons, has invited six disparate friends to her place for dinner and drinks. The guests are revealed with touching comic irony as a cross-section of modern day humanity. The colourful cast includes a narcissistic actor, a parachute instructor, an aspiring songwriter, a secretary and a lesbian couple. As their conversations meander and drift, they begin to open up to one another... but can you ever really know anyone? An intricate look at the lives of the different guests as they are on their own and when in the company of others, simply showing how relationships between people can intersect and also make each other stand out. Blue Window explores the unique loneliness we can feel in one of the world's most populous cities.

Blue Window premiered in 1984 to successful reviews and was a long running off-Broadway hit at Theatre Guinevere in New York City. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been produced widely at professional theatres across the US, and has been mounted by colleges and community theatres.

Cast: 4 female, 3 male

What people say:

"Knock the '80s if you must, but at least they gave us Blue Window ... a work blessed with the perfect balance of elegance and modesty, of self-knowing sophistication and self-mockery, of lives lived all too cerebrally and physically.." — Los Angeles Times

"The function of the piece isn't to narrate the events of this typical New York gathering, it's to angle their disparate fragments into a picture of our life today, of its disconnections and the way in which they mysteriously connect us." — Village Voice

"An affecting, funny account of a night in some lonely Manhattan lives." — WQXR

"What Blue Window suggests with the evasiveness of its party chatter and the chill of its most searing monologue is that people are unknowable and life is made up of random pieces of a puzzle that don't fit together the way we think they should." — Newsday

About the Playwright:

Craig Lucas is an American screenwriter, performer, stage and film director, and award-winning playwright. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and Tony nominee, his honours include the L.A. Drama Critics Award, two OBIE Awards, and the Excellence in Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.