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.