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The Mistakes Madeline Made

The Mistakes Madeline Made
Your Price: $18.95 CDN
Author: Elizabeth Meriwether
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 39
Pub. Date: 2006
ISBN-10: 0822221721
ISBN-13: 9780822221722
Cast Size: 2 women, 3 men (doubling)

About the Play:

The Mistakes Madeline Made is a full-length comedy by Elizabeth Meriwether. What happens if you just stop showering? Ablutophobia, the fear of bathing, becomes a problem for three personal assistants working in cramped quarters. An unlikely story of love, loss, and dirty people from the creator and showrunner of hit sitcom New Girl.

The Mistakes Madeline Made is not about Madeline at all. Rather, it is the story of a young woman named Edna who works in a basement-office for a needy, wealthy family of higher powers whom we never see. Edna's life is a mess. She has to put up with an overbearing perfectionist of a boss named Beth, and an absurd co-worker, Wilson, who expresses his feelings in a bizarre way. Struggling with a soul-crushing job and the traumatic death of her older brother, she wages a furious, funny war against all things complacent, pampered, and clean. But the real fun comes when Edna begins stealing office supplies, develops Ablutophobia, the fear of bathing, and stops living clean entirely. Let the dirty games begin! As Edna's smell starts to overwhelm her co-workers and many casual lovers – a series of bad poets – the play raises the questions: Is dirty living a political act? And is clean living even possible in these times of unrest?

The Mistakes Madeline Made was originally produced in 2006 by at NYC's Naked Angels Theater and was subsequently produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, the internationally celebrated professional theatre in residence at Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut, and by Holland Productions in Boston. Since then the play has been produced in professional theatres and in college theatre productions as a showcase of student talent.

Cast: 2 women, 3 men (doubling)

What people say:

"Crisply assured style and brainy content…which charts the breakdown of a newly minted college grad on her first brain-numbing job – suggests a bright future for this scribe…Meriwether's gift as a playwright is her ability to take what is familiar and real and view it through the distorted lens of absurdism. Mistakes Madeline Made takes a good hard look at how the world appears to a generation of smart young kids. From a safe distance, the picture is savagely funny. But when you get close enough, it looks like hell." — Variety

"The wounded characters reveal themselves to each other and to us via startling emotional juxtapositions; quietly disquieting confessions of pathos and loss are scattered among their oddball interactions. Every element of this production coheres into a successful whole." — OffOffOnline

"Mistakes Madeline Made is essential viewing." — Herald Sun (Sydney)

About the Playwright:

Elizabeth Meriwether is an American playwright and screenwriter, television producer and showrunner. She is known for creating the FOX sitcom New Girl, which was only the third pilot she had ever written. It aired 146 episodes over seven seasons. She is also executive producer of the Disney limited series The Dropout that follows the story of Elizabeth Holmes and the corporation Theranos.