About the Play:

The Country Club has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Male Monologues.

The Country Club is a full-length comedy by Douglas Carter Beane. A young woman returns to her hometown after her marriage goes bad. She then becomes reacquainted with her old high school friends, who never admit that anything bad happens. Ever. The Country Club provides a bitchy foray into the WASP nest of an exclusive Pennsylvania country club.

The Country Club follows a year in the lives of six insular friends and one outsider through a series of holiday-themed parties where drinks are flowing and truths are spewed. The storyline focuses on Soos; a young, witty, and charmingly neurotic woman who retreats from a failed marriage to her conservative, upper-class hometown of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. The type of WASP domain with the houses "that made Martha Stewart forget she was Polish." As party after party unfolds, the getaway weekend gives way to a year, and ultimately the rest of her life. Brittle conversation is bandied about, and Soos is reunited with her onetime boyfriend, the ever charming Zip. She also returns to her circles of old friends: the highly strung party planner Froggy; the wry and sarcastic Pooker; and the drunken good ol' boy Hutch. But cracks soon begin to show in the veneer. Zip falls in and out of an easy relationship with Soos. He starts an affair with Hutch's nouveau wife. Lives are casually destroyed, lives go on and through it all, tragedies are discussed without being mentioned. As Pooker observes between cocktail sips, "We all have our little stories and nobody brings them up. That's what's known as community spirit."

The Country Club premiered in 1995 at the Dorset Theater Festival in Vermont and was also staged at the Mojo Ensemble in Hollywood (Los Angeles Times Critics' Choice and Dramalogue awards). It had a regional premiere in 1998 at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, followed by its original New York presentation in 1999 by the Drama Dept. at off-Broadway's Greenwich House Theater. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and remains a popular choice for high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 4 female, 3 male

What people say:

"Mr. Beane has the ear of both the natural dramatist and the inspired satirist, often bringing a transforming poetic sparkle to the conventions of WASP-speak … a dialogist of refreshing grace and bite…." — New York Times

"The Country Club is Beane's best work, a Restoration comedy for today…." — New York Post

"In his newest comedy, The Country Club, Beane takes aim at young WASPs and their social rituals—and in turning from bees to WASPs, he has lost none of his sting…bright and effervescent…." — New York Daily News

About the Playwright:

Douglas Carter Beane is an an award-winning American playwright, screenwriter, and librettist. He co-founded the non-profit New York theatre company Drama Dept. and served as first artistic director from 1994-2006. He made his name as an author of stage comedies like As Bees in Honey Drown and The Country Club, but is now perhaps best known for his Tony nominated Broadway plays, including The Little Dog Laughed and The Nance.