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Jake's Women

Jake's Women
Your Price: $18.95 CDN
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

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 Womenwise, 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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