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Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander

Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander
Your Price: $18.95 CDN
Author: Preston Jones
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service (cover may change)
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 64
Pub. Date: 1977
Edition: Acting
ISBN-10: 0822207052
ISBN-13: 9780822207054
Cast Size: 3 female, 8 male

About the Play:

Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Female/Female Scenes, Female/Male Scenes, and Male/Male Scenes.

Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander is a full-length comedic drama by Preston Jones. This poignant, revealing and frequently hilarious play traces the life of a small-town Texas girl – from her days as a high school cheerleader through two marriages, motherhood, and finally, widowhood – showing how the right men, as well as the wrong ones, have affected her life. Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander is a rare and important piece of American Theatre.

Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander chronicles twenty years in the life of the title character as she adds to her name with each marriage. The place is Bradleyville, a small town in West Texas, where Lu Ann Hampton, seventeen, is living with her widowed nurse mother and dating the school basketball star. As a high school cheerleader, she has big dreams and the world is at her doorstep... Until her show-off older brother, Skip, brings home his truck driving Army buddy, Dale Laverty, and she settles for marriage to him. In the following act, ten years later, now a divorced single mother and working as a beautician, Lu Ann meets and marries the charming Corky Oberlander, only to lose him in a fatal auto accident. Then, a decade later again, we find Lu Ann still in Bradleyville, trying to cope with raising a teenage version of herself and taking care of her now alcoholic brother, and a mother who has been paralyzed by a stroke. In a moving scene she is visited by her high school sweetheart, who went from an awkward high school athlete to become a successful big-city preacher, and as they review the past it becomes eloquently clear that Lu Ann's life has come full circle – with her hopes and dreams sacrificed to the realities of everyday life, and with only her resolute spirit to sustain her towards the inevitable grayness of the future. Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander is the epic story of a woman who sacrifices her dreams of faraway places for the realities of life in a small town. Part of A Texas Trilogy, this standalone play is the middle play in the series, but no knowledge of the other two is needed to follow the life of its title heroine through three decades in her life.

Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander, The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia, and The Oldest Living Graduate – three related but independent plays known collectively as A Texas Trilogy – were brought to public attention in 1975 on the main stage of the Dallas Theater Center when patrons experienced a triple-play production that began at 7 p.m. and lasted through 2 a.m. The plays, which can be seen in any order, drew such attention that critics and theatre luminaries from around the nation were soon flying to Dallas to witness them. Since then there have been hundreds of productions of these three plays all over the regional theatre circuit.

Cast: 3 female, 8 male (The role of Lu Ann was written to be played by the same actress throughout, but the 17-year-old Lu Ann and her 17 year-old daughter have also been played the same actress.)

What people say:

"…the most interesting American playwright to emerge since Tennessee Williams." — New York Times

"Preston Jones is clearly and demonstrably a great American playwright…." — The Hollywood Reporter

"Beat the drums and ring the bells. A major new dramatist has arrived on the Broadway scene." — Bergen Record (New Jersey)

"Time has been kind to Preston Jones.... The old gal still has the sass, the grit, the good humor, and the humanity that impressed so many people in the Seventies and put Jones' fictional village of Bradleyville on the theatrical map.... While Lu Ann has fared poorly in matrimony, she knew love and she makes that clear. In her and in her family and friends, we see flashes of loss, regret, resignation, tenderness, and sweet acceptance, the emotional colors that deepen them the way the darkening blue at twilight makes a Texas sky seems so much more full." — The Austin Chronicle

About the Playwright

Preston Jones (1936-1979) was an American actor and late-blooming playwright who spent his adult life in Texas, working as a director, ticket taker, and lead actor at the Dallas Theater Center. Almost 40 when he finished A Texas Trilogy, a set of three plays that blend many of the same characters and events into overlapping scenarios of small town Texas life, his work was cut short by early death.