About the Play:

Fit to be Tied is a full-length comedy by Nicky Silver. Boyd may be the great love of Arloc's life. When Boyd readies to leave, Arloc fears his last chance for happiness may leave him... so he ties him up. Wouldn't you? Then his mother shows up.... And everybody's getting into the act...

Fit to be Tied is a wacked-out family comedy, which addresses the AIDS crisis and the human need for love in Nicky Silver's characteristically loopy, hysterical fashion. Arloc Simpson is fabulously wealthy but desperately lonely, living a solitary life for many years. When one day he reads the obituary of a former lover, he knows at once he's in trouble. "Pneumonia is a code word when you read it in the paper!" For the first time, he wrestles with the idea of his own mortality, and has a blood test, the results of which he cannot bring himself to read. The envelope sits, unopened, taunting him. "It's my enemy. And my apartment isn't big enough for both of us!" So he leaves, and walks, and walks, and walks…and meets HIM! Arloc meets someone he believes may be the great love of his life, Boyd, a young runaway with no family who is working as an angel at Radio City's Christmas Spectacular. Arloc invites him up for a drink, but when Boyd readies to leave, Arloc is terrified that his last chance for happiness will slip away, so he kidnaps him. At that moment, Arloc's mother, Nessa, descends upon him. A flamboyant, fast-talking, heavy-drinking promiscuous woman, Nessa has fled her loveless marriage and, with nowhere else to go, seeks refuge with her son. When she stumbles upon the angel, bound and gagged in the closet, she realizes her son is in trouble, and asks Boyd to stay by paying him, "I'll pay you…one pearl each day you stay and pretend to love him." Thus the three of them live together and form what turns out to be a fragile, wonderful "ménage à trios". It isn't until Carl, Nessa's husband, appears, and demands that his wife return, that our trio realizes the magic quality of their relationship. Nessa uses her love for Boyd to wound Carl, but it is her willingness to give him up that surprises Arloc. She proves herself eager to sacrifice, to start again and to finally have the relationship she had avoided with her child. Knowing this, Arloc can finally live with the contents of that dreaded envelope, whatever it may be.

Fit to be Tied premiered in 1996 at Playwrights Horizons off-Broadway in New York City. The play has been performed in regional and college theatre productions.

Cast: 1 female, 3 male

What people say:

"Silver has a rare gift for creating dramatic moments that pulse with both shiny humor and somber despair." — New York Times

"The world's to laugh at and the script makes you do a lot of laughing…Amoral, freethinking and blunt, [Fit to be Tied] has no shame about honoring family values (though hardly of a right-wing kind) and no qualms about the power of love to heal…." — Village Voice

"Silver has a rare gift for creating dramatic moments that pulse with both shiny humor and somber despair." — The New Yorker

"Silver strikes gold when he's being funny. Here he is very funny indeed, and the more outrageous he becomes, the funnier he gets." — New York Post

About the Playwright:

Nicky Silver is an award-winning American playwright. He exploded onto the American theatre scene in October of 1993, with the off-Broadway opening of his play Pterodactyls (Oppenheimer Award, Kesselring Award, Drama Desk nomination, Outer Critic's Circle nomination). His plays have been produced extensively in New York City as well as across Europe and as far away as South Korea.