About the Play:

Hold Please has become a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.

Hold Please is a full-length comedy by Annie Weisman. A complex, sweeping portrait of American work life, Hold Please chronicles the workdays of two generations of executive secretaries battling technology, corporate infrastructure, and most importantly each other. It is office politics in all its tragicomic humour and heartbreak, forever changed by the feminist movement.

Hold, Please is a hysterical send-up of 21st Century office politics. No men are onstage, but their presence is felt everywhere in this "9 to 5" for the new millennium. Two generations of women, career secretaries in their forties and entry-level assistants in their twenties, gather in the break room for a Heart Talk – an emotional tribunal designed to record and report evidence of sexual harassment. Leading the charge is Agatha, a bitter old secretary determined to bring the badly behaving bosses to justice and to institute a purely professional environment. As soon as the meeting breaks up, however, we learn that one of the young assistants, Erika, is carrying on an affair with Solomon, the oldest and most revered of the bosses. Soon, the Heart Talks have a measurable effect. Xavier, one of the partners, gets dismissed for sexual harassment. Only Erika knows that he has been wrongly targeted. Agatha and her fellow longtime secretary Grace enjoy a certain pride in their ability to affect change in the company. They seem to have an ally in Jessica, the other young secretary, who gets a little drunk on their new-found power, using it to manipulate her loser boyfriend and relishing in her ability to navigate the new phone and computer systems that befuddle the older women, Erika is abruptly dumped by Solomon, just as she discovers that she is pregnant. When the new boss arrives, everyone is surprised to learn that she is a young woman, younger than all of them. She immediately institutes an efficiency contest. Whoever can demonstrate the most alacrity at their job, wins. But what will happen to the rest of them? Erika has to decide to stay or go; Jessica has to prove her mettle; and there is a suggestion that Solomon may have had affairs before, even with Grace. When Agatha gets the change she was after, will it turn out to be better or worse?

Hold Please premiered in 2001 at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California. 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: 4 female

What people say:

"Scathingly funny." — New York Daily News

"A savage comedy about four secretaries about to be downsized." — New York Post

"Sparklingly original and fun…risky, bold, unusual, and witty." — Variety

About the Playwright:

Annie Weisman is an American television writer-producer (About A Boy, Desperate Housewives) and playwright. She wrote plays at Williams College in Massachusetts and during her junior year studies abroad at Oxford in England, then gradually crafting her present life as creator, executive producer and showrunner of Apple's dramedy series Physical.