Hamilton-Gibson’s next One Night Stand is a landmark American comedy that has often intrigued audiences because of its unconventional plot, characters, and dialogue. The offbeat play is Edward Albee’s “The American Dream,” whose debut 55 years ago is regarded as the beginning of “the theatre of the absurd” movement in America. The Hamilton-Gibson production of this one-act play, under the direction of Larry Biddison, will be staged in readers theatre format in the Warehouse Theatre on Central Avenue in Wellsboro. |
Absurdist plays dispense with conventional notions of character, plot, action, and setting in favor of deliberately unrealistic methods. The characters in “The American Dream,” for instance, have names that do not match reality. In the play “Mommy” isn’t a mother, “Daddy” isn’t a father, and “Grandma” isn’t a grandmother.
Although the 1960 production of “The American Dream” was generally well received, some critics attacked the play for its negativism. However, Albee defended his play as "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, emasculation, and vacuity; it is a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen."
The characters you’ll meet in the play are Grandma (Nancy Szabo), a wise-cracking old person who can’t remember whether she’s the mother of Mommy or of Daddy; Mommy (Cindy Evans), the household's sadistic disciplinarian; Daddy (Craig Evans), an emasculated masochist; Mrs. Barker (Mary Ginn), a “professional woman” from the Bye-Bye Adoption Agency; and Young Man (Jacob Ritter), the idealized perfect young man: aka, the American Dream.
The sole performance of Hamilton-Gibson’s readers theatre production of “The American Dream” will be at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, July 31, in the Warehouse Theatre on Central Avenue in Wellsboro. The admission price is a donation of each attendee's choosing and includes the post-performance coffee and dessert discussion. For more information or to make reservations, call 570-724-2079 oremailhamgib@gmail.com.