About the Play:

HARD TO FIND BOOK, only a very limited number of copies are still available.

Dear Friends is a full-length drama by Reginald Rose. Concerned with well-meaning friends who try to reunite an estranged couple, the play blends irony, humour and moments of high drama as it reveals in turn the secret ills which beset the marriages of the "dear friends" who would set another's house in order. Dear Friends is a gripping drama from the Emmy award winning film and television author who gave us 12 Angry Men.

Dear Friends was written right on the cusp of some very big social changes in American culture in which divorce became a more viable option for bad marriages. It is the story of four couples, all good friends. What if it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year? You've got friends who will be there for you! Right? What if those friends are just meddlesome, busybody, buttinski folk who can't leave well enough alone and have to knit-pick at your problems to make them feel better about their own? In Dear Friends, that recipe for disaster is exactly what's brewing up in the Lambert's Living Room. With the intention of patching up the dissolved marriage of a pair of their friends, three couples assemble for a party at the apartment of Douglas and Sally Lambert. The estranged couple, Michael and Lois Graves, arrive separately – with no hint that the real purpose of the party is to get them to reconcile. When it becomes apparent what their friends' motive is, they decide to leave. But at their friends' pleading they stay – not only to discuss their own problems, but to expose the skeletons in the other couples' closets as well. Gradually, tensions and antagonisms begin to erupt. One by one, the "dear friends" lash out at each other until the facade of affection and kindliness is stripped away. What is left is brash reality: to probe into the lives of others is to risk the disquieting examination of one's own failures.

Dear Friends began as a 90-minute teleplay written for CBS Playhouse as part of a live television series of plays that aired in 1967. This probing, absorbing study of marital turbulence was an Emmy-nominated television milestone. Available in the author's own stage adaptation, the play has been performed in college theatre productions as a showcase of student talent..

Cast: 4 female, 5 male, 1 small part for a girl

About the Playwright:

Reginald Rose (1920-2002) was one of the outstanding television playwrights to emerge from the "Golden Age" of television drama anthology series. He wrote numerous teleplays for the live drama anthologies in the 1950s and 1960s, including 12 Angry Men. He also created, supervised, and wrote many episodes of the successful television series The Defenders (1961-1965), a weekly courtroom drama based on one of his Studio One episodes. He won three Emmy awards for television and was nominated for an Oscar for the feature-length film of Twelve Angry Men.