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The Wayside Motor Inn

The Wayside Motor Inn
Your Price: $18.95 CDN
Author: A.R. Gurney
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service (cover may change)
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 78
Pub. Date: 1978
Edition: Acting
ISBN-10: 0822212250
ISBN-13: 9780822212256
Cast Size: 4 female, 6 male

About the Play:

The Wayside Motor Inn is a full-length drama by A.R. Gurney. Outside Boston, ten people – some strangers, some not – struggle with the circumstances that have brought them to The Wayside Motor Inn. With old grudges and new feuds threatening the travellers' peace, The Wayside Motor Inn is a funny and moving play that examines the tenuous space between loneliness and connection, and the fragile framework of the American Dream.

The Wayside Motor Inn is a truly original and creatively structured play, which employs a highly inventive theatrical form to convey its conclusions about the impersonality and, too often, the futility of modern American life. The scene is a motel outside of Boston: a depersonalized, antiseptic environment into which, one after the other, come five sets of travellers. There is a well-to-do couple on a visit to their married daughter who just had a baby; a lonely salesman looking for a bit of romance with the inn's waitress to temper the boredom of a business trip; an overbearing father and his latently rebellious son en route to a Harvard interview; a pair of liberated college students intent on a weekend of passion; and an embittered doctor and his wife who are divorcing and meeting to divide up assets. Although the various occupants of the motel room are often on stage at the same time, they neither see nor hear each other, and it is quickly evident that their shared location is, in reality, five different rooms. But, as each of the individual dramatic situations is developed, the irony, humour and pathos which they evoke is heightened by the silent proximity of the other characters – building, in the end, to a kaleidoscopic pattern in which their separate stories blend and re-blend into a subtle but telling indictment of the shortcomings, large and small, of life in contemporary America.

The Wayside Motor Inn premiered in 1977 at the prestigious Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) off-Broadway in New York City. Since then the play has been produced at professional theatres, including a 2014 revival at The Signature Theatre off-Broadway where the response was so strong the play was extended for several weeks, and has been mounted by colleges and community theatres.

Cast: 4 female, 6 male

What people say:

"It's a lofty topic, and Gurney has the talent and intelligence to tackle it." — Cue Magazine

"…it is the cumulative effect of the episodes that matters – that and his humor and the liveliness of his writing." — The New Yorker

"A.R. Gurney has given a true gift of theatre – insight into other people's lives while showing the struggles we all share." — Show Business

About the Playwright:

A.R. Gurney (1930-2017) is known as one of the most prolific and produced playwrights in America. His work focuses primarily on the issues and realities of middle-class American life and has been produced on international theatre stages for more than 50 years. He is also the author of three novels and a two-time Pulitzer Prize for Drama nominee, the recipient of the Drama Desk Award, and the Award of Merit from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

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