Dinah and Bill, a devout, church-going couple from the Midwest are struggling to keep their lives intact after the loss of their daughter. Dinah is compelled to reconnect with her left-leaning cousins in Northern California who’re going through their own trials. Jeannette and Neil have lost their home to a wildfire and Neil has cancer. However, they seem to have accepted their situation with astounding good humor, living in a yurt on their burn site and celebrating life with hits of pot and glasses of good red wine. Bill and Dinah are both moved and perplexed by their cousins’ remarkable equanimity. But their sympathy turns to rage when they find out that Jeannette is planning to take her own life to avoid a life of grief without her beloved Neil.

By Jane Anderson

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Reader’s Theatre

Reader’s theatre is a style of theatre in which the actors do not memorize their lines. Rather, they either go through their blocking holding scripts and reading off their lines, or else sit/stand together on a stage and read through the script together. In Reader’s Theatre, actors use vocal expression to help the audience understand the story rather than visual storytelling such as sets, costumes, and intricate blocking. Like storytelling, Reader’s Theatre can create images by suggestion that could never be realistically portrayed on stage. Space and time can be shrunk or stretched, fantastic worlds can be created, marvelous journeys can be enacted. Reader’s Theatre frees the performers and the audience from the physical limitations of conventional theater, letting the imagination soar.

Produced through special arrangement with
Samuel French, Inc.
45 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10010
www.samuelfrench.com