About the Play:

Impossible Marriage has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues, Female/Female Scenes, and Female/Male Scenes.

Impossible Marriage is a full-length comedy by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Beth Henley. A misguided wedding flies off the rails in this wildly funny and moving play about a balmy Southern family. Before Impossible Marriage ends, a gun is fired, a wedding cake is ravaged and assorted secrets, whose nature can be discerned early on, are dragged into the open.

Impossible Marriage is a poetic, whimsical, and wildly funny Southern gothic fairy tale. The entire action of the play takes place in Kandall Kingsley's beautiful and mysterious garden. Much to her dismay, Kandall's overly romantic youngest daughter, Pandora, plans to marry the brooding Edvard Lunt, a worldly artist twice her age. The elegant Kandall does not think the match to be at all suitable. Flora, Pandora's wry older sister, who is expecting a child at any moment, and married to the affable and handsome Jonsey, plots with her mother to break off the marriage. Unexpectedly, Sidney Lunt, the groom's tightly-wound son, arrives with a note from his mother, Edvard's ex, in which she vows to throw herself from an attic window if the marriage goes forward. To make matters worse, even the kind-hearted Reverend Lawrence who has come to wed the couple has secret hopes and desperate secrets sure to interfere with the impending union! Throughout this hilarious and moving play the characters struggle heroically with the impossibility of finding an allegiance between their civilized duties and primitive desires.

Impossible Marriage premiered in 1998 by the famed Roundabout Theatre Company at its off Broadway space, the Laura Pels Theater. Since then the play has been successfully staged at several professional theatres across the US. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been mounted by colleges and community theatres.

Cast: 3 female, 4 male

What people say:

"Nothing fascinates Beth Henley, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Crimes of the Heart, quite like the misdemeanors and occasional felonies committed in the name of love. If the title of one of her most underrated plays, Impossible Marriage, doesn't give it away...." — Los Angeles Times

"Beth Henley is a virtuosic wordsmith." — New York Times

"A brisk and perky new comedy. What gives the play its savor and joy are, as usual, Henley's women — those ditsy females, unknown to natural law, who always seem to get their own way, disconcerting even when they don't know what their own way is." — New York Post

"True to her intellectually quirky style, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Beth Henley has created a work that's as poetic and whimsical as it is dramatic and concrete … an intoxicating play that sends up love and marriage." — Time Out

"Henley's writing echoes her characters' eccentricities. It is filled with the odd, endearing turn of phrase and the unlikely plot twist that deliver laughs and sometimes even a rueful moment or two. A blissful visit with a delightfully balmy family." — Associated Press

About the Playwright:

Beth Henley is an award-winning American playwright, screenwriter, and professor best known for her play Crimes of the Heart (Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play). Her plays have been produced on Broadway and continue to be well-received and widely popular, both in professional and regional theatres throughout the United States as well as internationally and translated into fourteen languages.