About the Play:

Love Diatribe has become a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.

Love Diatribe is a full-length comedy by Harry Kondoleon. The characters in Love Diatribe are all caught in a web of anxiety and confusion, unable to find a way to love even their own family, let alone themselves. But love works wonders when it's the only way out of a sticky situation brought on by years of just being together.

Love Diatribe is about two "boomerang children" who move back in with their parents after failed personal relationships. Orin, a befuddled librarian, arrives at his parents' home for dinner to find that his sister, Sandy, left her husband, moved back home and began an affair with Mike, the next-door neighbour, and an old childhood friend Orin used to taunt. Mrs. Anderson, Mike's mother, pops in and out of the action, constantly offering food and reminding Orin's family that she still blames them for her other son's death. Orin's parents, Gerry and Dennis, return home, having forgotten they invited Orin for dinner. With everyone together, crazy accusations, witty retorts and hilarious remembrances fill the scenes. Into this melee comes Frieda, a foreign exchange student destined for Mrs. Anderson's, but getting the wrong house. Frieda immediately falls for Orin, then takes over the gathering with her charm. To Orin she reveals she is actually the stand-in for the real exchange student and can change accents to prove it. Frieda's ideas on love, and how it can heal situations like the one she stumbled into, become overpowering when she infuses a tea party with a magical love potion made from flowers. She then delivers her "love diatribe" on how to cure the ills between all her new friends. Challenging Orin and Sandy to follow her advice, they have no choice but to do as she asks when everyone who drinks the tea becomes unconscious. Orin and Sandy pour out love to their family and friends who wake up more refreshed than they have ever been. Underneath the farcical tone, Love Diatribe is a provocative call to recognizing and using the healing power of love.

Love Diatribe premiered in 1990 at the Circle Rep Theatre off-Broadway in New York City. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been successfully staged at several professional theatres across the US.

Cast: 4 female, 3 male

What people say:

"Out of this picture of family horror … Kondoleon extracts laugh after laugh. There is a pure and lovely madness here…." — New York Post

"Love Diatribe is such a sweet, delicate modern fable about neurotic barriers and the transformative power of love ... Kondoleon presents about as unsympathetic a brood of self-absorbed whiners as you could find this side of a narcissists convention, and miraculously finds a way to make us like them." — The Los Angeles Times

"Kondoleon's homecoming is a hilarious blend of humor and psychology tinged with a touch of pixie dust." — Show Business

About the Playwright:

Harry Kondoleon (1955-1994) was a near-legendary New York poet, artist, novelist, and playwright. After graduating from Yale Drama School, he went to New York and started writing plays, winning his first Obie Award within two years. Over the course of his bright and brief career, he wrote 17 plays and 2 novels.