About the Play:

Teach Me How to Cry has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues, and Female/Female Scenes.

Teach Me How to Cry is a full-length drama by Patricia Joudry. It is about a young teenage girl who feels isolated and outcast in her town, and in her home, and an outspoken boy who meet and the conflict between restricting family ties and individual freedom and self-realization. Against all odds, they help each other find dignity, open affection and a positive sense of identity. Especially recommended for school and contest use.

Teach Me How to Cry follows two outcast teenagers and their respective relationships with their parents, who are trying to keep them apart. According to theatre critic Walter Kerr in the New York Herald-Tribune, the play is "a delicately written relationship between a self-conscious, proud youngster who guesses – correctly – that her not-quite-bright mother was never married… There is a troubled, only reluctantly hostile relationship between a boy who thinks of himself as 'more the writer type' and the ambitious but ineffectual parents who want to urge him toward better things… As the boy and girl, both of them outcasts in the high-school world of prom dates and grapevine rumors, stumble upon one another and slowly find their ways toward dignity, open affection and some sort of identity. Teach Me How to Cry leafs over a good many attractive memory-sketches … Patricia Joudry, who wrote the play … has done honorably by most of her characters … it is everywhere marked by talent." Though the boy and girl are separated by their parents who refuse to acknowledge one another's worth, the vital steps to maturity have been taken and through their love for each other they emerge as important people.

Teach Me How to Cry was first produced on CBC radio and television in 1953. It was the first female-written work to be produced at the Lucille Lortel Theatre (known at the time as the Theatre De Lys), where it enjoyed a well received off-Broadway run 1955, and won the best play award at the 1956 Dominion Drama Festival – Canada's national drama festival. It was re-titled Noon Has No Shadows and was the first Canadian production with an all-Canadian cast to play London's West End in 1958. It also became the basis of the 1958 film, The Restless Years. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in school theatre productions as a showcase of student talent.

Cast: 7 female, 3 male, 3 or 4 extras

What people say:

"Teach Me How to Cry is superior work in all categories." — The New York Times

"Teach Me How to Cry by Patricia Joudry, is a sugarplum of a work, rich with small insights and full of bittersweet truth. Yes, it is sentimental, but the sentimentality is more hard-nosed than treacly, and the play is a rewarding evening of theater." — The New York Times

About the Playwright:

Patricia Joudry (1921-2000) was a Canadian playwright and author. She was English-speaking Canada's first twentieth-century playwright to make a living from her writing. Born in Spirit River, Alberta, she grew up in Montréal but moved to Toronto in 1940 to write and act for radio. Over the next decade, she became one of the most successful radio comedy writers in North America. During the 1950s, she turned to more serious dramatic writing for radio, television and stage. In 1957, she shared the Woman of the Year Award as Canada's outstanding woman in literature and art. Many of her stage plays have been produced on Broadway and in London's West End. Her best known play was her first: Teach Me How to Cry.