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Jake's Women
Jake's Women
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Author: Neil Simon Publisher: Samuel French (cover may change) Format: Softcover # of Pages: 120 Pub. Date: 2011 Edition: Acting ISBN-10: 0573694354 ISBN-13: 9780573694356 Cast Size: 7 female, 1 male
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About the Play:
Jake's Women has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.
Jake's Women is a full-length comedy by Neil Simon.
A struggling novelist is
more successful with fiction than with life,
where the shadow of a failing marriage looms large. Jake, who is more
comfortable passively observing his life as opposed to living it,
calls upon the ghost of a memory, a snarky therapist, an abrasive
sister and a host of other dynamic and hilarious women to help him
save his marriage – and him from himself.
Jake's Women is a semi-autobiographical examination of
dysfunctional relationships between the sexes. Neil Simon used
his own troubled marital history as the basis for this study about a
narcissistic writer, Jake, who handles
the world in his much imagination much better than that pesky real
one just outside his study, where the shadow of a failing marriage
looms large. He faces this marital crisis by
daydreaming and making up dialogues in his head between himself and
the women in his life. As his second marriage crumbles, Jake's women
"characters" enter his days and nights – with the most
uncomfortably astute observations about his life. The wildly comic
and sometimes moving flashbacks played in his mind are interrupted by
visitations from actual females. Jake's women include a revered first
wife who was killed years earlier in a car accident, his daughter who
is recalled as a child but is now a young woman, his boisterous and
bossy sister, his less-than-supportive analyst, his current wife who
is leaving Jake for another man, and a prospective third wife. Jake,
played by Alan Alda on Broadway, is a man lost in the most
terrifying place a writer can imagine – his own mind.
Jake's Women premiered in 1990 at the Old Globe Theatre in San
Diego, California. It had a pre-Broadway engagement in 1992 at the
Stevens Center in Winston-Salem as part of the North Carolina School
of the Arts Broadway Preview Series. It premiered later that same
year at the Neil Simon Theatre and ran for seven months on Broadway. 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: 7 female, 1 male
What people say:
"Fantastically funny ...
Jake's Women are a wonderful crowd." —
The New York Post
"Full of funny lines."
— New Yorker
"Jake's Women –
wise, rueful, ironic and gently self-deprecating – remains one
of Simon's most mature and enjoyable works." — The
Los Angeles Times
"Wit and wisecracks aplenty."
— United Press International
"Spending time with Jake's
Women is a wholly justifiable diversion for the audience
as well as the protagonist." — The New York Daily
News
About the Playwright:
Neil Simon (1927-2018) was America's most prolific
playwright. He had dozens of plays and nearly as many major motion
pictures produced. He was showered with more Academy and Tony
nominations than any other writer, and is the only playwright to have
four Broadway productions running simultaneously. His plays have been
produced in dozens of languages, and in 1983 became the only living playwright to have a New York theatre, the Neil Simon Theatre, named in his honour. His true success, however, is in his unique way of
exposing something real in the American spirit.
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