About the Play:

The Understudy has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues and Male/Male Scenes.

The Understudy is a full-length comedy by Theresa Rebeck. A smug Hollywood action star has been cast in a prestigious role in a long-lost Kafka play on Broadway. Things couldn't be better…until he meets his understudy. Can a hassled and stressed stage manager prevent a battle royal from developing between the two rival actors? The Understudy is a dazzling and humanistic look at people trying to do what they love in the face of obstacles that mount.

The Understudy takes place backstage where the understudy is more than he's supposed to be, the star wants to be more than he is, and the stage manager just can't take any more. Charged with running the understudy rehearsal for the Broadway premiere of a newly discovered Franz Kafka masterpiece, the stage manager Roxanne has one afternoon to get it right. There's just one problem – her professional and personal life collides when Harry, a journeyman actor and her ex-fiancé, is cast as the understudy to Jake, a mid-tier action star yearning for legitimacy. Roxanne – also a frustrated actor – is still recovering from her relationship with Harry, which abruptly ended six years earlier when he walked out on her two weeks before their wedding. She hasn't heard from him since. As Harry and Jake find their common ground, Roxanne tries to navigate the rehearsal with a stoned lightboard operator, an omnipresent intercom system, the producers threatening to shutter the show and her own careening feelings about both actors and her past. Will – and should – the show go on? The Understudy touches on a range of thorny issues: jealousy, anxiety, and rage as talent-free actors become stars while their more-gifted counterparts are relegated to the understudy role.

The Understudy premiered in 2008 on the Nikos Stage during the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It opened off-Broadway at Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre in New York a year later. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 1 female, 2 male

What people say:

"Bountiful laughs from a sumptuous display of strained nerves [The Understudy is] a scattershot backstage comedy by Theresa Rebeck." — The New York Times

"…deliver[s] a clever indictment of contemporary theatre while making the characters' personal circumstances ever more Kafkaesque: They are no more in control of the forces of celebrity, art, money, and Broadway than they are of their own fates." — The New Yorker

"A masterpiece of comic clockwork, raucously funny." — The Wall Street Journal

"It feels less like watching a play and more like eavesdropping on a mashup of backstage goings-on and a late-night literary debate in a dark cafe. It's also very funny…." — Broadway World

About the Playwright:

Theresa Rebeck is an American playwright, director, television writer, and novelist. She is the most Broadway-produced female playwright of our time. Her plays include Bad Dates, Omnium Gatherum (co-written, Pulitzer finalist), Spike Heels, and Mauritius, which won Boston's prestigious IRNE and Elliot Norton Awards. She has written for TV since the 1990s with shows such as NYPD Blue for which she has won the Peabody, the Writer's Guild, and the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar awards.