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The Day They Shot John Lennon
The Day They Shot John Lennon
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Author: James McLure Publisher: Dramatists Play Service (cover may change) Format: Softcover # of Pages: 67 Pub. Date: 1984 Edition: Acting ISBN-10: 0822202794 ISBN-13: 9780822202790 Cast Size: 2 female, 7 male
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About
the Play:
The Day They Shot John Lennon has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues, and Female/Male Scenes.
The Day They Shot John Lennon is a full-length drama by
James McLure. The Beatles singer and songwriter John Lennon
was shot and killed on December 8, 1980 in front of his Manhattan
apartment house. The following day, New Yorkers gathered in
spontaneous vigils to mourn and pay tribute. James McLure
builds his play from the interactions of strangers, at times
humorous, moving, or even menacing, as they struggle to understand
the larger significance of the event. The Day They Shot John
Lennon is a powerful tribute to the life of an artist gone too
soon.
The Day They Shot John Lennon follows a diverse group of
New Yorkers who assemble in the street in front of the Dakota
apartment building where John Lennon was shot to death and, in doing
so, places a personal face on the worldwide outpouring of grief.
Comprised of a deftly blended series of encounters between strangers
gathered to pay tribute to their slain idol, and it is from the
interwoven stories of a cross section of these people that the author
builds his play. Included are a young hot-shot advertising executive
and a legal secretary who were both at Woodstock; a group of high
school students preoccupied with romantic disputes and entanglements;
a pair of Vietnam vets turned-petty-thieves; an elderly retiree from
a neighbouring building who mistakenly thinks that the murder victim
was Jack Lemmon; and a young black aspiring stand-up comic who, in
turns out, is the son of the old gentleman's doorman. Through the
interaction of these people, sometimes humorous, sometimes moving,
sometimes menacing, the author points up the larger significance of
the event which has brought them together – the shock wave which
was felt across the nation by this further evidence of the violence
and ugliness lurking in our communal soul. Touching and timeless,
heartbreaking and hopeful, The Day They Shot John Lennon
captures the sense of shock and uncomprehending loss which followed
that awful event.
The Day They Shot John Lennon premiered in 1983 at the
McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. 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, 7 male
What people say:
"…we're transported right
back to that December 1980 day of mourning when the songs of an era
took on sad, new ironies, and when no one could think of the right
words to express an inexplicable loss." — The New
York Times
"…the play focuses in on
society's often cruel and unjust ills, which today's audiences will
recognize as being as meaningful now as they were then." —
St. Augustine Record
About the Playwright:
James McLure (1951-2011) was an American playwright and
actor best known for his two one-act plays that reached Broadway. He
became interested in acting in high school, performing in
Shakespearean plays. He obtained a BFA degree from Southern Methodist
University in Dallas, Texas, and subsequently studied at the Pacific
Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Santa Maria, California. He
was a participant playwright in The Missoula Colony, a writers
workshop of the Montana Repertory Theatre and the only playwright to
contribute to the Colony in every year for the first 15 years of its
existence. He also wrote original screenplays for Columbia Pictures,
Universal Pictures, and Twentieth Century-Fox.
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