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By the Sea By the Sea By the Beautiful Sea: Three One-Act Plays

By the Sea By the Sea By the Beautiful Sea: Three One-Act Plays
Your Price: $17.95 CDN
Author: Joe Pintauro, Lanford Wilson and Terrence McNally
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service (cover may change)
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 70
Pub. Date: 1996
Edition: Acting
ISBN-10: 0822215071
ISBN-13: 9780822215073
Cast Size: 2 female, 1 male

About the Play:

Day has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.

By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea, contains a trio of interconnected one-act plays by Joe Pintauro, Lanford Wilson and Terrence McNally. This triple bill of one-act plays, written by different playwrights, each with two women and a man on an isolated beachfront, cycles through a single day – in stages of dawn (love), noon (desire), and dusk (loss). While conceived as a trilogy, the plays can be produced separately with equal effectiveness.

In the opening play Dawn, by Joe Pintauro, Quentin and his sister Veronica, together with his wife Pat, gather at the beach to scatter their mother's ashes. The act itself is a closure of sorts, but it stirs up conflicts between the three as marital wounds and sibling rivalries never dealt with are finally confronted.

The second play, Day, by Lanford Wilson, takes a playful look at Ace, a local gardener who goes to the beach on his lunch hour and runs into Macy, an attractive young woman (complete with a laptop and an agenda). Macy seduces Ace into applying her tanning lotion, but then the gardener's nutty girlfriend arrives to give them all a run for their money.

The third play, Dusk, by Terrance McNally, focuses on Willy, a hunk at the beach, and the two women, Dana and Marsha, who would do anything to have him. We discover that all three suffer from their own personal prisons from which they need to escape, and luckily they seem to have found the right place and time to do so.

The trilogy By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea was originally presented in 1995 at The Bay Street Theatre of Sag Harbor in Long Island, New York, and subsequently presented in 1996 by Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) at City Center Stage II in New York City.

Cast: 2 female, 1 male

What people say:

"Beautifully acted and mounted, sometimes masterfully and always entertainingly written, [this] is one of the must-sees of the summer." — Southampton Press

"…an evening of thoughtful, provocative plays that share an exploration of relationships, love and lust." — New York Newsday

"…so moving as to cause one to marvel at how the language of theater art can express the accumulated rage, the scarred disclosures — all that is so patly called life's baggage—with the focus and empathy that real life, blindingly defensive, does not allow." — The New York Times

About the Playwright:

Joe Pintauro (1930-2018) was an award-winning American author, poet and prolific playwright in late 20th century New York. A former priest, he graduated from Fordham University in New York City with an M.A. in American Literature before studying Theology for four years at Niagara University. He is the acclaimed author of two novels, several volumes of poetry, and a plethora of plays. He is best known for works such as Raft of the Medusa, Cacciatore, and Men's Lives.

Lanford Wilson (1937-2011) was one of the most distinguished American playwrights of the late 20th century. He was instrumental in drawing attention to Off-Off Broadway, where his first works were staged in the mid-1960s. He was also among the first playwrights to move from that milieu to renown on wider stages, ascending to Off Broadway, and then to Broadway, within a decade of his arrival in New York. His work has also long been a staple of regional theaters throughout the United States. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame, and in 2004 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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.