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Lemonade and The Autograph Hound
Lemonade and The Autograph Hound
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Author: James Prideaux Publisher: Dramatists Play Service (cover may change) Format: Softcover # of Pages: 50 Pub. Date: 1969 Edition: Acting ISBN-10: 0822200813 ISBN-13: 9780822200819
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About the Play:
This
volume contains the one-act plays Lemonade
and
The
Autograph Hound
by
James
Prideaux.
The
Autograph Hound
takes
a humorous but scathing look
at
the obsessive celebrity-chaser. Lemonade
is an equally funny and
perceptive
play concerning the frustrations ans loneliness of middle-age.
Lemonade:
A perceptive and funny study about the fantasies, inhibitions and
dreams of two frustrated and lonely middle-class matrons who set up
competing lemonade stands along a jammed highway. This short play
incorporates comedy and tragedy, a touch of the bizarre, and
ultimately, a sincere compassion in both women. As outlined in Show
Business: "Lemonade
features ... a pair of Peoria
matrons who seek respite from the doldrums of middle age by selling
spiked lemonade to highway travelers. The dialogue is hilarious as
the two trade drinks and the fantasies they have concocted to
brighten their dull lives. But the two strong performances really
emerge when we find there is no sale. ...Mabel has not raised a
crippled son; ...Edith has not seen her children burn to death. Their
lemonade grows tepid; their fantasies lose lustre. Prideaux's theme
is the desperation with which we seek to evade the mundane, the
illusions small people live by, and the emptiness which can exist
beneath the veneer of supposed well-being."
(Cast: 2 female)
What people say:
"The dialogue is bright, witty
and to the point an evening of dark humor." — WABC-TV
"Prideaux's plays are light as
a souffle, his lines sparkle like prisms and his wit is derived from
sharp observations of oh, grateful surprise normal people."
— Long Island Press
The Autograph Hound: A
sharply humorous and inventive play which takes a revealing look at a
wife who is an obsessive celebrity-chaser who finds meaning
in her life through collecting autographs, a resentful husband who
takes serious action against her compulsion, and their young adult
daughter who is caught in-between them. As the Associated
Press describes "The
Autograph Hound is …
so funny and unphony that an old hand playwright could be proud of
it. The play ... is funny in a comfortable way. It bases its humor on
human and domestic foibles. The playwright's views seem to be that
some faults are completely ridiculous and in no way admitting of
praise and yet, reassuringly, they spring from an unquenchable human
spirit to be celebrated rather than censured. The wife in the
three-character play is a full-blown eccentric who stands for hours
outside every possible celebrity gathering place to get autographs.
One night when she's out, standing in the snow, her husband tears up
the treasured collection housed in three living room filing cabinets,
bests her in a strangling contest when she gets home, sends their
daughter out to find her own apartment, and declares a turning point.
But what way will they turn? She's the one, after all, with the
'thrill of the chase' as she expresses it. They find their
togetherness — he joins her hobby."
(Cast: 2 female, 1 male)
The off-Broadway debut of the author, the double bill of Lemonade
and
The
Autograph Hound
was
first presented in 1968 by New York's famed Playwrights Unit at the
Jan Hus Playhouse on the Upper East Side. The plays have
become
a popular choice for high school and community theatre productions.
What people say:
"… a frequently funny, if
slanderous analysis of the types who haunt stage doors, hotel
entrances and Sardi's doorway in search of celebrities' signatures."
— Variety
"There's a nice feel of
boldness to the writing; a good sense of structures; and a genuinely
funny wit to the dialogue." — Cue Magazine
James
Prideaux (1927-2015) was a prolific American playwright and
television writer. A frequent collaborator and friend of Katharine
Hepburn, he wrote and produced three films with the iconic
actress including his Emmy-nominated work on the telefilm Mrs.
Delafield Wants to Marry. Early
in his career, he became a member of off-off Broadway's Playwrights
Unit, created by Edward Albee, Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder. His
plays have been produced on Broadway, off-Broadway, and regionally.
Among his awards, he has a New York Drama Desk Award and a Los
Angeles Film Board Award.
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