About the Play:

The Days and Nights of BeeBee Fenstermaker has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues, and Female/Female Scenes.

The Days and Nights of BeeBee Fenstermaker is a full-length dramatic comedy by William Snyder. Young Beebee Fenstermaker is brimming with hope and ambition when she makes her move to the big city to pursue her dream career as a writer. However, her lofty ideals are soon served with a swift punch to the gut as she finds difficulty balancing her "creative" work with paying the bills. The Days and Nights of BeeBee Fenstermaker is a compelling story that shows the everyday struggles of any artist starting out.

The Days and Nights of BeeBee Fenstermaker is the story of a small-town girl who goes to the big city to seek fame and fortune. Beebee Fenstermaker is a young, ambitious, romantic girl just out of college and established in her tiny apartment in some nameless city. She is writing a novel, but when her savings gives out she is forced to get an "everyday" job, hopefully one which "won't drain her too much" and will leave her time for her "creative" work. She begins working full time and writing in the evenings, but it is generally made clear to her that she really hasn't much literary ability. She switches to painting, for which she isn't terribly endowed either. Eventually, her hopes and aspirations burned away, she comes to an acceptance of her condition, which includes the inability to create a permanent relationship with a man. She has an overwhelming need for absolute union. Her lover's departure leads her first to a swift decline, represented by beer cans strewn around the untended apartment and an almost total isolation from the world, and then to a kind of resurrection – a fragile, undemanding relationship with a stranger begins to unfold. Will their love last? Will Fenstermaker finally finish her novel? The plight of the young creative struggling to balance their "everyday" job with their art is one that has long been rehashed and revisited, that is because it will never cease to be relevant.

The Days and Nights of BeeBee Fenstermaker premiered in 1962 at the Sheridan Square Playhouse in Greenwich Village, garnering critical praise, and was a long-run Off-Broadway success – it ran for more than 9 months and over 300 performances. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional, community, and college theatre productions as a showcase of student talent.

Cast: 5 women, 3 men

What people say:

"BeeBee gets the season off to a fast start…A credit to the theatre…." — New York Journal-American

"A freshness of spirit, an affectionate insight and a sense of the human comedy…." — New York Herald-Tribune

"BeeBee Fenstermaker is a solid intelligent piece of work, full of clear, sustained feeling and informed by an acute sense of what it means to be alive at this moment…." — The Commonweal

About the Playwright:

William Snyder (1929-2008) was an American playwright and a longtime faculty member of the theatre department at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He taught a variety of theatre subjects including acting, playwrighting, and directing during his thirty two years at the University. He is best known for his play The Days and Nights of BeeBee Fenstermaker.