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Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander
Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander
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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
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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.
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