About the Play:

Pterodactyls has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues, Female/Male Scenes, and Male/Male Scenes.

Pterodactyls is a full-length comedy by Nicky Silver. A classic dysfunctional family is the vehicle for a descent into chaos, and this viciously hilarious yet touching story addresses the classic question: "Why are we here?" Pterodactyls suggests that our extinction is beginning not with an asteroid or an ice age but rather with a severed connection to the ones closest to us.

Pterodactyls is an absurdist black comedy about the demise of the well-to-do Duncan family, and, by extension, the species. Dysfunction takes on new meaning with the Duncan Family. Emma Duncan, a hypochondriac with memory problems, and her orphaned fiancé, Tommy, confront her mother, Grace, with the news of their intended marriage. Disapproving at first, Grace acquiesces and puts Tommy to work as a maid. Shortly after, Grace's son, Todd, returns home and discloses that he has been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS which sets off a frenzy of denial-spurred activity. The father, Arthur Duncan, reaches out to his son who is more interested in assembling the dinosaur bones he discovers in the back yard. As the wedding approaches, Tommy falls in love with Todd and when confronted with this news, Emma goes quite spontaneously deaf. It is only during a frenzied wedding rehearsal, after Tommy is informed he's HIV positive and Emma shoots herself with a gun given to her by her brother as a wedding gift, does the possibility that Todd is destroying his family rear its head. As winter descends, the bottom falls out of the farce and the tone is replaced with a more ironic one. Tommy has died (although he's not been buried as "the ground is too hard"), Grace's glamour has been replaced with an alcoholic haze, and Arthur cannot remember that Emma has died. Only Todd remains unchanged. In a final manipulation, Todd accuses Arthur of being responsible for Emma's death, and provokes his father into attacking him. Grace has no choice but to banish Arthur from the house and into what now seems a lifeless tundra outdoors. Left alone with his mother, Todd pours her drink after drink as the months pass, until she too, at last, is dead. Finally, as Todd embraces his sister's ghost, we see the dinosaur skeleton, now complete. No one knows why the dinosaurs lived, or died, Todd told his mother. He suggests the possibility that their end was the natural order of things "and no tragedy. Or disease. Or God."

Pterodactyls premiered in 1993 at The Vineyard Theatre off-Broadway in New York City. One of the first plays on the American stage to deal with a family's response to the AIDS epidemic, it was the winner of both the Kesselring and Oppenheimer Awards. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been performed in regional, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female, 3 male

What people say:

"…Pterodactyls struck me as the flip-side of The Skin of Our Teeth Thornton Wilder's antic celebration of mankind's ability to muddle through." — New York Times

"There are times – not all that many, admittedly – when a critic wishes he had never used the word 'brilliant' before, so he could offer it fresh minded and glittering to something new. And different…." — New York Post

"Clever is the word for Pterodactyls … clever, sharp, witty – it's a play that takes aim at the main-streamed, moneyed, conventional American family and buries it under one satiric jibe after another." — TheaterWeek

About the Playwright:

Nicky Silver is an award-winning American playwright. He exploded onto the American theatre scene in October of 1993, with the off-Broadway opening of his play Pterodactyls (Oppenheimer Award, Kesselring Award, Drama Desk nomination, Outer Critic's Circle nomination). His plays have been produced extensively in New York City as well as across Europe and as far away as South Korea.