About the Play:

Max and Maxie is a full-length comic drama by James McLure. Alternately touching and funny, this imaginatively conceived play introduces us to a now rich and famous ex-vaudevillian, Max Love, who is about to appear in a production of Waiting for Godot. Max and Maxie takes us on a fascinating journey back into his checkered past, when he teamed up with Maxie, and pursued the dream of success.

Max and Maxie is about the life of a former vaudeville star and the partner he loved and exploited. Now rich, famous and on the waning side of greatness, Max Love is in Florida about to star in a production of Waiting for Godot, an absurdist play he does not understand. An ex-vaudevillian, Max is not much for such "high-class" pursuits as the theatre, and he is struggling to learn the lines. A young production assistant (who is awed in the presence of a "living legend") helps him with his cues and, at the same time, begins to pepper him with questions about his fabled career as a comic. Cutting swiftly back and forth between past and present, the play then evolves into a series of varied and revealing scenes: Max's hardscrabble early days on the vaudeville circuit; teaming up with Maxie, a young hoofer of Hispanic background; their success as a team and their eventual marriage; and, in the end, Maxie's disillusionment and descent into schizophrenia. Ultimately Max's story becomes one of unbridled ambition and a ceaseless striving for perfection and success at any cost, and the price that this exacts both from him and from those close to him. For, in the final essence, Max finds that while he may have made it to the top, he has arrived there alone, embittered and, in the most personal sense, unloved and unfulfilled.

Max and Maxie premiered in 1984 in Denver Center Theatre Company production at the Source Theatre in Denver, Colorado. It was further developed in a Cincinnati Playhouse-in-the-Park production in the Thompson Shelterhouse in 1988 and received its New York premiere in 1989 at the York Theatre Company of Broadway in New York City. Since then the play had regional premieres at professional theatres across the US and has been mounted by community theatres.

Cast: 1 female, 2 male

What people say:

"His characters are not only assailable by young actors, but they tend to be the kind of wacky, hardboiled folk into which youthful performers love to sink their collective teeth." — Chicago Tribune

"That he is an actor as well as a writer contributes to McLure's strengths. These include a sharp eye for character, a gifted ear for regional idiomatic speech, and an uncommon comic flair that extends to the examination of American myths and mores." — Contemporary Dramatists

About the Playwright:

James McLure (1951-2011) as an American playwright and actor best known for his short plays with small casts that are often set in a single location. He became interested in acting in high school, performing in Shakespearean plays. He obtained a BFA degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and subsequently studied at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Santa Maria, California. He was a participant playwright in The Missoula Colony, a writers workshop of the Montana Repertory Theatre and the only playwright to contribute to the Colony in every year for the first 15 years of its existence. He also wrote original screenplays for Columbia Pictures, Universal Pictures, and Twentieth Century-Fox.