Progress - Acting Edition

by Doug Lucie

• ISBN13: 9780822209201
• ISBN10: 0822209209
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1988-02-26
• Publisher: DRAMATISTS PLAY SERVICE INC

Summary

THE STORY: The play is set in the London home of Will, a handsome, well-educated television-documentary researcher, and his attractive, social activist wife, Ronee, who runs a community center in South London. Anxious to match his wife's liberal concerns, Will has taken over most of the household chores, and has formed a male consciousness-raising group, whose principal interest seems to be a close examination of pornography. Ronee, however, is now involved with a female lover, and her unwillingness to expand the relationship to a menage a trois (as Will would like) has driven a wedge between husband and wife. Further complications arise when Ronee brings home a young battered wife, Ange, whose brutish young husband soon discovers her whereabouts and tries, by force, to take her home. Also in and out of the action are the rather pathetic Oliver, who is shattered by the sudden absence of his live-in lover, Martin; a young barman named Bruce (who is Martin's new boyfriend); and Will and Ronee's boarder, Mark, a Fleet Street gutter journalist who delights in tasteless jokes and imagines himself to be sexually irresistible. Filled with bitterly funny repartee, and sudden bouts of anger and violence, it is the uneasy relationship between these characters which forms the disturbing, but revealing, heart of the play-and, when all pretenses are stripped away, demonstrates how little these middle-class activists are able to bring order to their own lives, much less to the larger society in which they are foundering.