About the Play:

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

The Autumn Garden is a full-length drama by Lillian Hellman. The setting is a summer resort on Louisiana's Gulf Coast in 1949. Seven friends confronting middle age assess the choices they have made and are about to make. The work is compassionate, savagely funny and perhaps Hellman's most perceptive comment on the difficulties of "the great art of living together."

The Autumn Garden revolves around past and new confrontations between residents of a summer guesthouse off on Louisiana's Gulf Coast in 1949. In the words of New York Post: "Miss Hellman is contemplating the meaning of middle age to an assorted group of people gathered together in a summer home… All of them are in one way or another frustrated and unhappy. Most of them are under the illusion that some day the things from which they suffer will be removed and they will be once more at peace. But when they come to see themselves, they realize that man is the sum of his past life, that they are incapable of any real revolt against their past, and that what they have made of themselves in earlier years is what they are when age approaches…Nor are they tragic figures. All of them are troubled average people, human, commonplace…but they are studied with great understanding and a touch of intelligently unsentimental compassion." One of the defining playwrights in 20th-century American theatre, Lillian Hellman, believed The Autumn Garden to be her best play.

The Autumn Garden premiered in 1951 at the Coronet Theatre on Broadway in New York City. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been performed in regional theatre productions.

Cast: 7 female, 5 male

What people say:

"The characters are not only brilliantly drawn, they are notably actable…All the parts are vivid and fascinating…because Miss Hellman has written them out of knowledge and integrity." — New York Times

About the Playwright:

Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) is considered one of the most acclaimed American dramatists of the first half of the twentieth century. In an era that largely favoured lighthearted romantic plays and drawing-room comedies, her works explored the human capacity for malice, the allure of power and money, and the dichotomy between individual interests and social conscience. She was also the first woman to be admitted into the previously all-male club of American "dramatic literature", primarily on the basis of two enormously successful plays from the 1930s: The Children's Hour and The Little Foxes.