About the Play:

Marco Polo Sings a Solo has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Male Monologues.

Marco Polo Sings a Solo is a full-length comedy by John Guare. Floating on an iceberg off the coast of Norway an acclaimed filmmaker is carving his statement of the Century: an epic movie about the life and times of the Venetian explorer Marco Polo. Marco Polo Sings a Solo is a brilliant absurdist comedy that offers an antic and sometimes disquieting glimpse of what the future may hold.

Marco Polo Sings a Solo is about the nonchalance of society toward important issues and the concern with self-involved motivations. The time is 1999, the place an iceberg off the coast of Norway. The main characters struggle to create things that will bring them personal glory, while other characters strive to hold onto their past glories that give them their sense of self-worth. Stony McBride, a young movie director and adopted son of an aging Hollywood star, is writing a film about Marco Polo, in which, it is hoped, his father will make a comeback. Stony is also attempting to deal with his attractive wife, a former concert pianist whose lover, a dynamic young politician who has gotten hold of the cure for cancer, is also on hand. Adding to the rapidly multiplying complications are Stony's mother (a transsexual, as she later confesses); a friend named Frank (who has been in space orbit for the past five years); a maid (who is impregnated astrally by Frank); and another friend, Larry (who is fitted with a set of mechanical legs). There is also an earthquake; the discovery of a planet; and the birth of a new hero (Stony himself?); all coming together, within the bizarre action of the play, to yield some chilling, albeit very funny, glimpses of the future that may await us all.

Marco Polo Sings a Solo premiered in 1973 at the Nantucket Stage Company in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Since then the play made its Off-Broadway debut in 1977 at The Public Theater, was revived Off-Broadway by the Signature Theatre Company in 1999. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been mounted by colleges and community theatres.

Cast: 3 female, 5 male

What people say:

"Mr. Guare is one of our most inventive playwrights. He has a great wit and, perhaps more importantly for the theater, an immaculate sense of the ridiculous … a brilliantly absurdist comedy of ideas." — New York Times

"…one of the most fertile magpie comic imaginations in the theatre today." — The New Yorker

About the Playwright:

John Guare is an American playwright. He received the Obie, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and Tony nominations for The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, which also won the Olivier Award for Best Play. He won a Tony for his libretto to Two Gentlemen of Verona, which also won the Tony as Best Musical of 1972. His screenplay for Louis Malle's Atlantic City earned him an Oscar nomination.