cover photo by Jerry Bauer
this collection contains two full-length plays:
BANG
BEAUTIFUL BODIES
and one long one-act:
CRUISING CLOSE TO CRAZY
BANG:
“Cunningham came up with the
idea for this play while researching a story for the New York Times on
survivalists, those people who are training and preparing so they can survive
the end of the world. BANG is far from a documentary, however. Cunningham uses
survivalists as the raw material for a preposterous black comedy that highlights
one manifestation of our modern madness.”
Tom Valeo, Chicago Herald
“Laura Cunningham's script tells how
a couple of east-coast, neurasthenic, miserable, impotent, boom-generation
failures named Len and Sheila Calendar visit their old friend Bev and her new
husband Roy in Roy's underground, nuke-resistant condo in Utah...
Naturally Len and Sheila and Roy and Bev get stuck down there together....
Cunningham gives us all the predictable reversals, but BANG remains a hilarious
analysis of who's going to join the cockroaches at the end of the world and why.
Hilarity: it's in the lines, of which I wrote down a great many that I'm not
going to read back to you here. Suffice to say that Cunningham maintains a
laugh-per-line radio about equal to Neil Simon's while remaining true to her
situation and her considerable intelligence.”
Anthony Alder, Reader
“BANG is more than a farce,
however....
Cunningham has created a fantastic reality in her play, but within
the nonsense are disturbing ideas that won't be received by an audience unless
delivered through laughter.”
Tom Valeo, Chicago Magazine
2 M, 2 F
also available in a single edition: BANG
BEAUTIFUL BODIES:
“Cunningham
displays a knack for smart, catty chatter...the sophisticated and often funny
repartee contribute to the play's swiftness and appeal. The parts very nearly
play themselves, needing only some seasoned pros to add the right dash of pepper
and spice.”
Variety
“It's a juicy,
jazzy party, with a bottomless punch bowl of wit.”
Bob Campbell, The Star-Ledger
“So Claire is pregnant, and
they all know that, but none of her five friends have spoken to her in six
months. This is her baby shower. The six guests met in college and are the women
of playwright Laura Cunningham's engaging and witty dramatic comedy BEAUTIFUL
BODIES....
Real women—and the men in their lives—certainly talk about this stuff and
playwright Laura Shaine Cunningham isn't afraid to write it down. She gives her
characters honest lines, lines that reveal the 'secret life' , the essence of
our most intimate moments.”
Dufflyn Lammers, Savannah Morning News
“Playwright Laura Cunningham's
razor-sharp ear for dialogue carries the whole thing along like a breeze. Segues
from the banal into the profound are natural, and the emotional tenor never
wavers. Cunningham's ability to reveal characters' innermost insecurities via
their reactions to hors d'oeurves recalls the intense party sequences in works
by British stage and screenwriter/director Mike Leigh....
Cunningham also shares with Leigh an adroit sense of social cruelty
and does a wonderful job of illustrating women's penchant for both attacking and
protecting each other's weaknesses.”
Ada Calhoun, The Austin
Chronicle
6 F
also available in a single edition: BEAUTIFUL BODIES
CRUISING CLOSE TO CRAZY:
“The play is set on the bus of a
country music star, Carolee Crockett, a heartbroken, pill-popping crooner. Her
bus is parked in the lot of a Grand Ole Opry kind of place, where she is about
to be honored, in concert, along with...the singer and love of her life, who
some months earlier had left her without a word in a motel in Albuquerque. If
the plot has the feel of a country song--`You're no better than you ought
to be, but you're good enough for me,' to quote a song from the script—well, that's on purpose.
It was gleefully played by a gleefully miscast ensemble, which included
Sigourney Weaver, as the whiny, weak Carolee; Kevin Kline as...the pot-smoking,
libidinous and self-justifying Lothario, and the lithe, soft-spoken Phoebe Cates
as Carolee's bawdy, bosomy confidante.”
Bruce Weber, The New York Times
Authentic country music background (the playwright traveled with Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson, Tammy Wynette and George Jones). Lends itself to cabaret format.
3 M, 3 F
Plays By Laura Shaine Cunningham
I S B N: 0-88145-210-6
$19.95