About the Play:

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

Dream Girl is a full-length dramatic comedy by Elmer Rice. A delightful young woman's efforts at running a bookstore are undermined by her drifting off into the most extravagant and sometimes comical daydreams. She is also in love with her childhood sweetheart, who happens to be married to her pregnant sister. One of the Pulitzer Prize winning author's most glamorous plays, Dream Girl is a romantic and comedic contemplation on the road less travelled.

Dream Girl is set in the New York City publishing world of the 1940s. Georgina Allerton is a single 24 year-old woman who quite inefficiently runs a bookstore and loves to write in her free time. She is a charming but dreamy, over-imaginative young woman whom the slightest suggestion may send off into the most extravagant daydreams as she seeks at every opportunity to escape into a romantic world of unreality. She is usually daydreaming about her sister's husband Jim Lucas, with whom she is madly in love. To try to forget him Georgina dates other men, always without success. In the spirit of James Thurber's 1939 short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, with a nod to Nick and Nora Charles of the famous Thin Man film series, we follow our heroine through a single day in her mundane life as a bookseller. Georgina wakes up and performs her morning ritual in front of a mirror before going to work. It is funny and very, very true. On this particular day, she struggles with decisions both in her daydreams and in reality that will make both of her worlds collide. Eight performers bring to life 32 characters in this rollicking comedy from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Adding Machine.

Dream Girl premiered in 1945 at the Coronet Theatre (now the Eugene O'Neill Theatre) and ran on Broadway for a year. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 3 female, 4 male, doubling 32 characters (alternate casting: 7 female, 25 male, several small parts)

What people say:

"Rice has produced a remarkable body of work – large, varied, experimental and honest … As a consistently experimental playwright he is rivalled in our theater only by O'Neill." — Robert Hogan, from The Independence of Elmer Rice

About the Playwright:

Elmer L. Rice (1892-1967) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist whose major contribution to American literature was an innovative approach to dramatic art and use of the flashback technique from the movies on the stage. A native of New York City, he studied law and passed his bar exams. However, he immediately began writing, and, from 1914 until the mid-1940s, he was one of the most prominent playwrights and theatrical directors in America, and made important contributions to motion pictures, both as an author and screenwriter. During his 45 years in the theater, he wrote 50 full-length plays, 4 novels, and several film and television scripts, as well as his autobiography. His most famous play The Adding Machine, satirized the dehumanizing effects of machines, but Street Scene a realistic drama that focused on the tenement life in New York City slums won him the greatest acclaim, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Dream Girl, a psychoanalytical fantasy, was his final popular success.