About the Play:

Dog Opera has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female/Male Scenes.

Dog Opera is a full-length comedy by Constance Congdon. Its story of the friendship between a gay man and a neurotic woman. Best friends since they were 14, it's Will And Grace meets The Real World as Pete and Madeline go looking for love in all the wrong places... and there's not a dog or an opera in sight.

Dog Opera is highly comedic as as well as dramatic and deals with the topics of AIDS, dating, gay male and straight female friendship, parental acceptance and more. Peter and Madeline have best been friends since they were teenagers in Queens. They have Manhattan apartments and separate unsatisfactory sex lives. Though more loving than most couples and searching for partners, they are incompatible: he is gay. Maddi is overweight and drawn to men who treat her badly. He hides behind snappy retorts and skepticism. Maddie's alcoholic mother, Peter's father, lovers, pickups, and friends with AIDS move through their lives. A homeless teenager, a thief and a poet who would rather be called a whore than a hustler because he doesn't try that hard address the audience to throw everyone's problems into perspective.

Dog Opera was first produced Off-Broadway in 1995 at The Joseph Papp Public Theatre in New York City and was a Finalist the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize honouring the best English-language women writers worldwide. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been performed in regional and college theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female, 5 male

What people say:

"Insinuates itself into the consciousness like a conversation in the next booth at a diner... Everything slowly comes to together to form a coherent, sometimes funny and finally moving contemporary comedy...It's a singular work created by an imagination of redeeming freedom and eccentricity." — The New York Times

About the Playwright:

Constance Congdon is an American playwright, adaptor, and teacher who is best known for her play Tales of the Lost Formicans and her adaptation of Maxim Gorky's A Mother. She has been called "one of the best playwrights our country and our language has ever produced" by playwright Tony Kushner. She has taught playwriting for many years, at the Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the Yale School of Drama, but her home is as playwright-in-residence at Amherst College where she's been teaching since 1993.