THE STORIES: BLIND DATE. A touching and very funny study of what befalls a fluttery, well-meaning aunt when she tries to arrange a date for her visiting (and uncooperative) niece. The setting is the living room of Robert and Dolores Henry’s home in Harrison, Texas; the time 1929. Dolores, once a high-school beauty queen, is now the scourge of her henpecked husband, who comes home from the office hungry and tired to find that there will be no dinner tonight. The reason is that Dolores has, at last, been able to arrange a date for her visiting niece, Sarah Nancy, and she wants Robert out of the way. But the young man, a would-be mortician, goes out the window as the bookish, rebellious Sarah Nancy refuses to play the flirtation game and, instead, makes it abundantly (and hilariously) clear that she considers Felix to be a boring oaf. Sarah Nancy’s attitude delights her uncle as much as it distresses her aunt, who retires from the field with a sudden sick headache. However, the two young people, left alone by their nosy elders, find a common interest at last—and, as the curtain falls, they are contentedly, and wordlessly, poring over a stack of wonderfully corny old high-school yearbooks. (2 men, 2 women.)
THE ACTOR. This play tells the hilarious and moving story of a young man, bitten by the acting bug, who’ll make any sacrifice to keep his dream of a theatrical career from being crushed under the weight of his parents’ expectations for him. It’s a charming exploration of artistic ambition from one of modern theatre’s greatest artists. (3 men, 2 women, several bit parts.)
“Foote writes with intelligence, sensitivity, humor, and compassion. BLIND DATE, understatedly funny and uninsistently touching, is full of lived humanity.” —New York Magazine.
“Besides being very funny, BLIND DATE has a bit to say about how oppressive sexual roles can be passed down from generation to generation…Few dramatists today can replicate this kind of storytelling with the gentle mastery that Mr. Foote provides…both sentimental and ruthless, toting up the losses in one generation’s life with warm compassion and a cold awareness that to live is ultimately to lose.” —The New York Times.
