About the Play:

Life and Limb has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female/Female Scenes, Female/Male Scenes, and Male/Male Scenes.

Life and Limb is a full-length dark comedy by Keith Reddin. Wounded in Korea, Franklin returns home minus an arm and a future. With zero prospects for work and a faltering marriage, he struggles to regain his life. When he finally lands a job, Franklin finds himself working for a sadistic manufacturer of artificial limbs. Deadpan, cold-blooded and comic, Life and Limb is not your typical veteran's story.

Life and Limb is focuses on the self-satisfied America of the 1950s, and the darkly comic personal vicissitudes of an embittered young veteran who returns from Korea heartsick (and minus his good right arm) to face the problems of finding a job and saving his marriage. As the play begins Franklin Roosevelt Clagg, a young draftee, and his new bride, Effie, are on their honeymoon, an idyll which ends when Franklin returns to his unit and then goes off to Korea, where he loses an arm. When he returns home things go steadily from bad to worse; facing resentment where he expected gratitude, disabled veteran Franklin can't find work, while Effie escapes her unhappy home through the movies and an afternoon affair. can't find a job; his wife escapes her unhappy home through the movies and an afternoon affair; and they are visited constantly by her dour Romanian confidant, Doina, who mangles the English language and shares Effie's passion for movies. Eventually Franklin lands a job of sorts by virtually selling his soul to Tod, a sadistic but successful manufacturer of artificial limbs whom Franklin had met in Korea, but his hope of pulling things together at last fails when Effie is killed in a freak accident at the movies. The action then moves to Hell, where Effie and Doina are occupied making potholders and visiting supermarkets and where they are soon joined by Franklin, still the poor innocent searching for an America that promises a boundless, wonderful life – and surely doomed to failure by the oddities and evils of a world he never made. Life and Limb is a biting, brilliantly inventive black comedy, which marked the debut of a young writer of unique talent and theatrical flair.

Life and Limb premiered in 1984 at South Coast Repertory (SCR) in Costa Mesa, California and was presented later that year at the Wisdom Bridge Theatre in Chicago. The New York premiere was produced to critical and popular acclaim by the famed Playwrights Horizons in 1985. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional repertory and college theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female, 7 male (alternate casting 2 female, 5 male with doubling)

What people say:

"…a macabre journey through that [American] mainstream, told in deadpan, cold-bloodedly ghoulish, comic style." — The New York Times

"Keith Reddin's play belongs to a vigorous American tradition of broad, black, bitter fantastic-satiric comedy…." — Village Voice

"…there are many funny lines and surprising moments." — The New Yorker

About the Playwright:

Keith Reddin is an American writer and actor who is considered by many to be a staple of Chicago theatre. He has written and acted in numerous plays with many local, regional, Off-Broadway, and Broadway theatres. He graduated from Northwestern University and attended The Yale School of Drama.