THE STORIES: The Great Nebula in Orion. This fascinating and brilliantly inventive play details the chance meeting, after many years, of two girlhood friends. One has "married well" and the other has achieved a successful career, but, for both, as their poignant and telling conversation reveals, there is an aching emptiness beneath the elegant veneer of their lives. (2 women.)
The Family Continues. A haunting play of memory, written in a stream-of-consciousness contrapuntal style, which evokes the panorama of a young mans life—birth, army service, marriage, job, parenthood, old age—within the brief span of its action. Highly innovative in its theatricality, the play illuminates not only the continuity of human life, but also the poignancy and bitterness that can infuse it. (5 men, 5 women, flexible casting.)
Ikke, Ikke, Nye, Nye, Nye. This explosively funny and ingenious farce deals with what might have been a seduction—but while she is all for it (despite her feeble protests) he has eyes only for her telephone. And what he can't say to her face, floods out readily on the phone, with hilarious and devastating results. (1 man, 1 woman.)
Victory on Mrs. Dandywine's Island. A high-style spoof on comedy in the Oscar Wilde mode, which keeps a delightfully straight face while poking fun at the stilted behavior of its very proper characters. The scene is the sitting room of Mrs. Dandywine's elegant summer "cottage," where things take a flustered turn at the unexpected arrival of a man who, of course, must be up to no good. (2 men, 3 women.)
